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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



.^ 



To 
PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON 
Whose lofty utterances have inspired a world 
struggling for Liberty and Justice, this book 
is respectfully dedicated. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 



For some of the addresses appearing in this 

book the compiler is indebted to Doubleday 

Page and Company, The National Geographic 

Society and The Washington Post. 



THE VOICES OF ODR LEADERS 

A COLLECTION OF ADDRESSES DELIVERED BY 
STATESMEN OF THE UNITED STATES 

AND 

HER ALLIES IN THE GREAT WAR 



COMPILED BY 

WILLIAM MATHER LEWIS 

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY 
NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES 



HINDS. HAYDEN & ELDREDGE. Inc. 

NEW YORK PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO 



31619 
. U 4-5 



Copyright, 1917, by 

HINDS, HAYDEN & ELDREDGE, INC. 

International Copyright secured. 



QEC 18 1317 

©CI.A481(12<i 



/IMS I 



INTRODUCTION 

BY . 

Hon. Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War 

Through these addresses he who Hstens 
shrewdly will hear the voices of the millions who 
have toiled and sacrificed that the promise of 
these words might come true. There are no 
literary exercises in this book. Nothing printed 
here was said because it sounds well, there are 
no empty rhetorical vanities. These are the 
words of the chosen leaders of the free nations, 
and they are underwritten every one of them with 
the heroism and the skill and the benignant power 
and the unfailing endurance of those who love 
liberty more than their comfort and their lives. 

This is what makes a speech memorable and 
only this : that it should be spoken at a turning 
point in human affairs on behalf of a great hope. 
These speeches were spoken in the days when 
the supreme decision was made to lay down the 
weight of the New World that the earth may be 
secure. In the light of such an event any utter- 
ance would be repeated while there were men to 
remember it. But the words printed here are 
touched not only with the glory of the American 
decision but with the undying warmth of the 
Three Years' Resistance. We recognized at the 



THE J'OICES OF OUR LEADERS 

time and we shall not iorget the messages brought 
to us overseas. We shall play our part and these 
words printed here shall be not only a promise 
but a prophecy that out of this agony and this 
enterprise we shall build a rich and enduring free- 
dom. We seek nothing more and shall accept 
nothing less. Scientifically and inexorably we 
shall go on till the menace which has risen in 
Central Europe to terrorize mankind is destroyed 
from without or discarded from within. 



IV 



CONTENTS 

Introduction, Hon. Newton D. Baker "i 

Oratory in National Crises, ^.. 

William Mather Lewis 

Addresses 

The Second Inaugural, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. . 3 
War Message, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. . . . .... ]^ 

Memorial Day Address, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. 33 

Flag Day Address, Hon. Woodrow Wilson ^^ 

Why Do We Fight Germany? 

Hon. Franklin K. Lane 

To Reserve Officers' Training Corps, ^^ 

Hon. Robert Lansing l" "-li vq 

Tribute to America, Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith /9 
The Oldest Free Assemblies, 

Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour 

Greetings to America, 

M. Alexandre Felix Joseph Ribot ^^ 

The Harvest of Justice, M. Paul Dechanal._ W 

Our Heritage of Liberty, M. Rene Viviam 103 

Their Monuments in Our Hearts, 

M. Rene Viviani 

To the House of Representatives, 

M. Rene Viviani 

Tribute to Lincoln, M. Rene Viviani i^i 

To the House of Representatives, 

Prince of Udine 

Greetings from Belgium, 

Baron Ludovic Moncheur 13y 

The New Russia, Prof. Boris Bakhmetiefif . ...... 145 

Tribute to Washington, Viscount Kikujiro Ishii. . 151 
Message to the Pope, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. . . 155 



PUBLIC SPEAKING IN NATIONAL 
CRISES 
The student of public speaking is impressed 
with the fact that from the earhest time wide 
periods have separated the occasions upon which 
great orations have been given to the world. 
Upon the stage of human affairs have come from 
time to time little groups of men who have 
wrought mightily with their ringing eloquence. 
When for many years mediocrity has marked 
the utterances of the public forum, the state- 
ment has often been made that the golden age of 
oratory was gone, never to return. But another 
group has always arisen to give the lie to this 
pessimistic assertion. The occasional recurrence 
of surpassing eloquence, the long periods of 
dreary utterance, suggest the fact that it is the 
occasion rather than the man which produces 
the spoken classic. Speakers may charm with 
the grace of their utterance, with their flights of 
fancy, with their brilliant word pictures, but 
unless the cause for which they plead is one of 
surpassing import to the people at large, they 
and their contemporaries will not find place in 
the Hall of Fame. The spoken word will ever 
have its effect upon the stage and from the pul- 
pit and in the courts of law: but only when a 
great issue is to be met, a great wrong righted, 
a great truth vindicated, will that spoken word 

VII 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

rise to the dignity of oratory. It is the soul sob 
of an oppressed people; the battle cry of an 
aroused nation ; the struggle for release from 
fetters of unrighteousness, which will ever sound 
through the tone of the real orator. Among all 
the great orations of the world, we find none 
which proclaims the trivial issue ; none has lived 
whose author was not obviously sincere. 

The last profound crisis through which this 
country passed was that culminating in the Civil 
War. It was likewise our last great oratorical 
period. Abraham Lincoln, master of the English 
language that he was, could not have produced 
a Gettysburg address under conditions less mov- 
ing than that which brought it into being. Henry 
Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Stephen A. 
Douglas and all the rest of that great group 
have lived in history because of the opportunity 
afforded by the times in which they worked. Back 
of the Civil War period we have to go to our 
Revolutionary days to find another great school 
of speakers, led by Patrick Henry in America 
and Edmund Burke in Great Britain. And so 
down through history we pass to Robespierre 
and Mirabeau of the French Revolution, back 
to Demosthenes of crumbling Athens : only to 
find that the great occasion has ever produced 
the great orator: that for every mighty human 

VIII 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

cause there has been "A Voice crying in the 
wilderness." Even the great cause of Christian 
reHgion shows its progress in these periodic 
groupings surrounding critical events. 

National crises, particularly wars, have always 
produced great orations. It is reasonable to as- 
sert that the present conflict, involving as it 
does, not two, but a score of nations, and having 
at root issues which afifect human happiness every- 
where, will stimulate in this country and through- 
out Europe public utterances of a commanding 
strength. Therefore it is safe to assume that 
some of the addresses chosen in the collection 
herewith presented will find place among the 
oratorical classics of all time. Be that as it may, 
they all deserve careful study because each is the 
product of a leader in the great struggle, each 
illuminates in some manner the great Drama in 
which all mankind has a part. 

In his ''Memories and Portraits" Robert Louis 
Stevenson says : "Whenever I read a book or a 
passage that particularly pleased me, in which a 
thing was said or an efifect rendered with pro- 
priety, in which there was either some conspicu- 
ous force or some happy distinction in the style, 
I must sit down at once and set myself to ape 
that quality. I was unsuccessful, and always un- 
successful ; but at least in these vain bouts I got 

IX 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in con- 
struction and the coordination of parts. . . . 
That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write : 
whether I have profited or not, that is the way. 
It was so Keats learned, and there was never a 
finer temperament for literature than Keats. It 
is the great point in these imitations that there 
still shines, beyond the student's reach, his in- 
imitable model. Let him try as he please, he is 
still sure of failure; and it is an old and very 
true saying that 'Failure is the high road to suc- 
cess." 

To him who has reveled in the glorious word 
pictures of Treasure Island, David Balfour, and 
Kidnapped, no other proof need be presented 
that the great novelist's method was effective, 
to all beside, the place which Stevenson holds 
in the world of letters will be assurance enough 
that he knew whereof he spoke. And if it be 
true that through the study and imitation of ac- 
knowledged masters, there comes proficiency in 
the written word, vastly more must such a 
method be valuable where skill in vocal ex- 
pression is sought. The essayist may spend 
hours locating the word which brings out the 
exact shade of meaning he wishes to con- 
vey. The speaker must have the needed expres- 
sion at his instant command. Thus it follows 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

that the student of piibUc speaking should make 
his own the best examples of oral phraseology 
available. He should bear in mind that the vocab- 
ulary of speech, must have qualities unnecessary 
and even undesirable in written composition ; and 
that his hearer has but a fleeting moment to 
grasp the thought, where the reader may pause 
to ponder over the hidden meaning of some in- 
volved sentence. He must study those composi- 
tions which have stirred listening audiences. It 
is for the student of this class that the addresses 
contained in this brief work are presented. 

It is well to familiarize one's self with the 
standard orations of all times, but the greatest 
good will come from the study of present-day 
examples. A century ago the speaker thought 
only of the audience before him: to-day, if he 
is a distinguished man, the "breakfast table 
audience" with the morning paper will be far 
larger than that within the sound of his voice. 
And so the style of oratory has changed, become 
more restrained and less verbose. That it has 
lost in this process none of its force and charm 
will be evident to all who read this collection 
of addresses bearing on the great war. It is 
not too much to say that in clarity of expression 
and felicity of phraseology some of the speeches 
of Woodrow Wilson will rank with those of his 
XI 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

great predecessors, Abraham Lincoln and George 
Washington. Nor will the brief and brilliant 
words of his contemporaries in Great Britain 
and France suffer by comparison with the utter- 
ances of the leaders of those nations which have 
given so much to the oratorical literature of the 
world. The student, young or old, who earn- 
estly studies these twentieth century messages 
and makes their style his own will acquire an 
asset of immeasurable value. He will likewise 
have a deeper love for the United States and a 
greater conception of the holy cause for which 
the nation struggles. 

William Mather Lewis. 



XU 



THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
Hon. Woodrow Wilson 



Delivered at Washington, D. C, 
March 5th, 1917 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 

WooDROW Wilson 

My Fellow Citizens: 

The four years which have elapsed since last 
I stood in this place have been crowded with 
counsel and action of the most vital interest and 
consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our 
history has been so fruitful of important reforms 
in our economic and industrial life or so full of 
significant changes in the spirit and purpose of 
our political action. We have sought very 
thoughtfully to set our house in order, correct 
the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial 
life, liberate and quicken the processes of our 
national genius and energy, and lift our politics 
to a broader view of the people's essential inter- 
ests. It is a record of singular variety and singu- 
lar distinction. But I shall not attempt to review 
it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing 
influence as the years go by. This is not the 
time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak 
our thoughts and purposes concerning the pres- 
ent and the immediate future. 

Although we have centered counsel and action 
with such unusual concentration and success 
upon the great problems of domestic legislation 
to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, 
other matters have more and more forced them- 
3 



4 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

selves upon our attention, matters lying outside 
our own life as a nation and over which we had 
no control, but which, despite our wish to keep 
free of them, have drawn us more and more 
irresistibly into their own current and influence. 

It has been impossible to avoid them. They 
have affected the life of the whole world. They 
have shaken men everywhere with a passion and 
an apprehension they never knew before. It 
has been hard to preserve calm counsel while the 
thought of our own people swayed this way and 
that under their influence. We are a composite 
and cosmopolitan people. We are of the blood 
of all the nations that are at war. The currents 
of our thoughts as well as the currents of our 
trade run quick at all seasons back and forth 
between us and them. The war inevitably set 
its mark from the first alike upon our minds, 
our industries, our commerce, our politics, and 
our social action. To be indifferent to it or inde- 
pendent of it was out of the question. 

And yet all the while we have been conscious 
that we were not part of it. In that conscious- 
ness, despite many divisions, we have drawn 
closer together. We have been deeply wronged 
upon the seas, but we have not wished to wrong 
or injure in return ; have retained throughout the 
consciousness of standing in some sort apart, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 5 

intent upon an interest that transcended the 
immediate issues of the war itself. As some of 
the injuries done us have become intolerable we 
have still been clear that we wished nothing for 
ourselves that we were not ready to demand for 
all mankind, — fair dealing, justice, the freedom 
to live and be at ease against organized wrong. 
It is in this spirit and with this thought that 
we have grown more and more aware, more and 
more certain that the part we wished to play 
was the part of those who mean to vindicate 
and fortify peace. We have been obliged to arm 
ourselves to make good our claim to a certain 
minimum of right and of freedom of action. We 
stand firm in armed neutrality since it seems that 
in no other way we can demonstrate what it is 
we insist upon and cannot forego. We may even 
be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own 
purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of 
our rights as we see them and a more immediate 
association with the great struggle itself. But 
nothing will alter our thought or our purpose. 
They are too clear to be obscured. They are 
too deeply rooted in the principles of our national 
life to be altered. We desire neither conquest 
nor advantage. We wish nothing that can be 
had only at the cost of another people. We have 
always professed unselfish purpose and we covet 



6 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

the opportunity to prove that our professions are 
sincere. 

There are many things still to do at home, to 
clarify our own politics and give new vitality to 
the industrial processes of our own life, and we 
shall do them as time and opportunity serve ; but 
we realize that the greatest things that remain 
to be done must be done wnth the whole world 
for stage and in cooperation with the wide and 
universal forces of mankind, and we are making 
our spirits ready for those things. They will 
follow in the immediate wake of the war itself 
and will set civilization up again. We are pro- 
vincials no longer. The tragical events of the 
thirty months of vital turmoil through which we 
have just passed have made us citizens of the 
world. There can be no turning back. Our own 
fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we 
would have it so or not. 

And yet we are not the less Americans on that 
account. We shall be the more American if we 
but remain true to the principles in which we 
have been bred. They are not the principles of 
a province or of a single continent. We have 
known and boasted all along that they were the 
principles of a liberated mankind. These, there- 
fore, are the things we shall stand for, whether 
in war or in peace : 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 7 

That all nations are equally interested in the 
peace of the world and in the political stability 
of free peoples, and equally responsible for their 
maintenance ; 

That the essential principle of peace is the 
actual equality of nations in all matters of right 
or privilege ; 

That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon 
an armed balance of power; 

That governments derive all their just powers 
from the consent of the governed and that no 
other powers should be supported by the common 
thought, purpose, or power of the family of 
nations ; 

That the seas should be equally free and safe 
for the use of all peoples, under rules set up 
by common agreement and consent, and that, so 
far as practicable, they should be accessible to 
all upon equal terms;- 

That national armaments should be limited to 
the necessities of national order and domestic 
safety ; 

That the community of interest and of power 
upon which peace must henceforth depend im- 
poses upon each nation the duty of seeing to it 
that all influences proceeding from its own citi- 
zens meant to encourage or assist revolution in 



8 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

other states should be sternly and effectually 
suppressed and prevented. 

I need not argue these principles to you, my 
fellow countrymen : they are your own, part and 
parcel of your own thinking and your own mo- 
tive in affairs. They spring up native amongst 
us. Upon this as a platform of purpose and of 
action we can stand together. 

And it is imperative that we should stand to- 
gether. We are being forged into a new unity 
amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the 
world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God's 
providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and 
division, purified of the errant humors of party 
and of private interest, and shall stand forth in 
the days to come with a new dignity of national 
pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that 
the dedication is in his own heart, the high pur- 
pose of the Nation in his own mind, ruler of his 
own will and desire. 

I stand here and have taken the high and 
solemn oath to which you have been audience 
because the people of the United States have 
chosen me for this august delegation of power 
and have by their gracious judgment named me 
their leader in affairs. I know now what the 
task means. I realize to the full the responsi- 
bility which it involves. I pray God I may be 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 9 

given the wisdom and the prudence to do my 
duty in the true spirit of this great people. I am 
their servant and can succeed only as they sus- 
tain and guide me by their confidence and their 
counsel. The thing I shall count upon, the thing 
without which neither counsel nor action will 
avail, is the unity of America, — an America 
united in feeling, in purpose, and in its vision of 
duty, of opportunity, and of service. We are 
to beware of all men who would turn the tasks 
and the necessities of the Nation to their own 
private profit or use them for the building up 
of private power; beware that no faction or dis- 
loyal intrigue break the harmony or embarrass 
the spirit of our people ; beware that our Govern- 
ment be kept pure and incorrupt in all its parts. 
United alike in the conception of our duty and 
in the high resolve to perform it in the face of 
all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great 
task to which we must now set our hand. For 
myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance, 
and your united aid. The shadows that now 
lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled 
and we shall walk with the light all about us if 
we be but true to ourselves, — to ourselves as we 
have wished to be known in the counsels of the 
world and in the thought of all those who love 
liberty and justice and the right exalted. 



THE WAR MESSAGE 
Hon. Woodrow Wilson 



Delivered before a joint session of 
the Senate and the House of Rep- 
resentatives of the United States, 
April 2nd, 1917 



THE WAR MESSAGE 
WooDROw Wilson 

Gentlemen of the Congress : 

I have called the Congress into extraordinary 
session because there are serious, very serious, 
choices of policy to be made, and made imme- 
diately, which it was neither right nor constitu- 
tionally permissible that I should assume the 
responsibility of making. 

On the 3d of February last I officially laid 
before you the extraordinary announcement of 
the Imperial German Government that on and 
after the first day of February it was its purpose 
to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity 
and use its submarines to sink every vessel that 
sought to approach either the ports of Great 
Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of 
Europe or any of the ports controlled by the 
enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean. 
That had seemed to be the object of German 
submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since 
April of last year the Imperial Government had 
somewhat restrained the commanders of its 
undersea craft in conformity with its promise 
then given to us that passenger-boats should not 
be sunk and that due warning would be given to 
all other vessels which its submarines might seek 
to destroy, when no resistance was offered or 

13 



14 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

escape attempted, and care taken that their crews 
were given at least a fair chance to save their 
lives in their open boats. The precautions taken 
were meagre and haphazard enough, as was 
proved in distressing instance after instance in 
the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, 
but a certain degree of restraint was observed. 
The new policy has swept every restriction 
aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, 
their character, their cargo, their destination, 
their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the 
bottom without warning and without thought 
of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels 
of friendly neutrals along with those of bellig- 
erents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying 
relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people 
of Belgium, though the latter were provided with 
safe conduct through the proscribed areas by 
the German Government itself and were distin- 
guished by unmistakable marks of identity, have 
been sunk with the same reckless lack of com- 
passion or of principle. 

I was for a little while unable to believe that 
such things would in fact be done by any gov- 
ernment that had hitherto subscribed to the hu- 
man practices of civilized nations. International 
law had its origin in the attempt to set up some 
law which would be respected and observed 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 15 

Upon the seas, where no nation had right of 
dominion, and where lay the free highways of 
the world. By painful stage after stage has that 
law has built up, with meagre enough results, 
indeed, after all was accomplished that could be 
accomplished, but always with a clear view, at 
least, of what the heart and conscience of man- 
kind demanded. This minimum of right the Ger- 
man Government has swept aside under the plea 
of retaliation and necessity and because it had no 
weapons which it could use at sea except these 
which it is impossible to employ as it is employ- 
ing them without throwing to the winds all 
scruples of humanity or of respect for the under- 
standings that were supposed to underlie the 
intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking 
of the loss of property involved, immense and 
serious as that is, but only of the wanton and 
wholesale destruction of the lives of non-com- 
batants, men, women, and children, engaged in 
pursuits which have always, even in the darkest 
periods of modern history, been deemed innocent 
and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the 
lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. 
The present German submarine warfare against 
commerce is a warfare against mankind. 

It Is a war against all nations. American ships 
have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways 



16 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, 
but the ships and people of other neutral and 
friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed 
in the waters in the same way. There has been 
no discrimination. The challenge is to all man- 
kind. Each nation must decide for itself how it 
will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves 
must be made with a moderation of counsel and a 
temperateness of judgment befitting our character 
and our motives as a nation. We must put excited 
feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or 
the victorious assertion of the physical might of 
the nation, but only the vindication of right, of 
human right, of which we are only a single 
champion. 

When I addressed the Congress on the 26th of 
February last I thought that it would suffice to 
assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to 
use the seas against unlawful interference, our 
rights to keep our people safe against unlawful 
violence. But armed neutrality, it now appears, 
is impracticable. Because submarines are in 
effect outlaws when used as the German subma- 
rines have been used against merchant shipping, 
it is impossible to *defend ships against their 
attacks as the law of nations has assumed that 
merchantmen would defend themselves against 
privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS \7 

upon the open sea. It is common prudence in 
such circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to 
endeavor to destroy them before they have shown 
their own intention. They must be dealt with 
upon sight, if dealt with at all. The German 
Government denies the right of neutrals to use 
arms at all within the areas of the sea which it 
has proscribed, even in the defense of rights 
which no modern publicist has ever before ques- 
tioned their right to defend. The intimation is 
conveyed that the armed guards which we have 
placed on our merchant ships will be treated as 
beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt 
with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is 
ineffectual enough at best ; in such circumstances 
and in the face of such pretensions it is worse 
than ineffectual: it is likely to produce what it 
was meant to prevent ; it is practically certain to 
draw us into the war without either the rights 
or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one 
choice we cannot make, we are incapable of 
making: we will not choose the path of sub- 
mission and suffer the most sacred rights of 
our nation and our people to be ignored or 
violated. The wrongs agginst which we now 
array ourselves are not common wrongs; they 
reach out to the very roots of human life. 
With a profound sense of the solemn and even 



18 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

tragical character of the step I am taking and of 
the grave responsibilities which it involves, but 
in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my 
constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress 
declare the recent course of the Imperial German 
Government to be in fact nothing less than war 
against the Government and people of the United 
States ; that it formally accept the status of 
belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; 
and that it take immediate steps not only to put 
the country in a more thorough state of defense 
but also to exert all its power and employ all 
its resources to bring the Government of the 
German Empire to terms and end the war. 

What this will involve is clear. It will involve 
the utmost practicable co-operation in counsel 
and action with the governments now at war with 
Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension 
to those governments of the most liberal financial 
credits, in order that our resources may so far as 
possible be added to theirs. It will involve the 
organization and mobilization of all the material 
resources of the country to supply the materials 
of war and serve the incidental needs of the na- 
tions in the most abundant and yet the most eco- 
nomical and efficient way possible. It will involve 
the immediate full equipment of the navy in all 
respects but particularly in supplying it with the 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 19 

best means of dealing with the enemy's subma- 
rines. It will involve the immediate addition to 
the armed forces of the United States already pro- 
vided for by law in case of war at least 500,000 
men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon 
the principle of universal liability to service, and 
also the authorization of subsequent additional 
increments of equal force so soon as they may be 
needed and can be handled in training. It will 
involve also, of course, the granting of adequate 
credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so 
far as they can equitably be sustained by the 
present generation, by well-conceived taxation. 

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by 
taxation because it seems to me that it would be 
most unwise to base the credits which will now 
be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It 
is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect 
our people so far as we may against the very 
serious hardships and evils which would be likely 
to arise out of the inflation which would be pro- 
duced by vast loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these 
things are to be accomplished we should keep 
constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as 
little as possible in our own preparation and in 
the equipment of our own military forces with 
the duty, — for it will be a very practical duty, — of 



20 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

supplying- the nations already at war with Ger- 
many with the materials which they can obtain 
only from us or by our assistance. They are in 
the field and we should help them in every way 
to be effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through 
the several executive departments of the Gov- 
ernment, for the consideration of your commit- 
tees, measures for the accomplishment of the 
several objects I have mentioned. I hope that 
it will be your pleasure to deal with them as 
having been framed after very careful thought by 
the branch of the Government upon which the 
responsibility of conducting the war and safe- 
guarding the nation will most directly fall. 

While we do these things, these deeply momen- 
tous things, let us be very clear, and make very 
clear to all the world what our motives and our 
objects are. My own thought has not been driven 
from its habitual and normal course by the un- 
happy events of the last two months, and I do not 
believe that the thought of the nation has been al- 
tered or clouded by them. I have exactly the 
same thing in mind now that I had in mind 
when I addressed the Senate on the 22d of 
January last; the same that I had in mind when 
I addressed the Congress on the 3d of February 
and on the 26th of February. Our object now, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 21 

as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace 
and the justice in the hfe of the world as against 
selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst 
the really free and self-governed peoples of the 
world such a concert of purpose and of action 
as will henceforth insure the observance of those 
principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or 
desirable where the peace of the world is involved 
and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace 
to that peace and freedom lies in the existence 
of autocratic governments backed by organized 
force which is controlled wholly by their will, not 
by the will of their people. We have seen the 
last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are 
at the beginning of an age in which it will be 
insisted that the same standards of conduct and 
of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed 
among nations and their governments that are 
observed among the individual citizens of civilized 
states. 

We have no quarrel with the German people. 
We have no feeling toward them but one of 
sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their 
impulse that their government acted in entering" 
this war. It was not with their previous knowl- 
edge or approval. It was a war determined upon 
as wars used to be determined upon in the old, 
unhappy days, when peoples were nowhere con- 



22 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

suited by their rulers and wars were provoked 
and waged in the interest of dynasties or of 
little groups of ambitious men who were ac- 
customed to use their fellowmen as pawns and 
tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their 
neighbor states with spies, or set the course of in- 
trigue to bring about some critical posture of 
affairs which will give them an opportunity to 
strike and make conquest. Such designs can be 
successfully worked out only under cover and 
where no one has the right to ask questions. 
Cunningly contrived plans of deception or ag- 
gression, carried, it may be, from generation to 
generation, can be worked out and kept from the 
light only within the privacy of courts or behind 
the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow 
and privileged class. They are happily impos- 
sible where public opinion commands and insists 
upon full information concerning all the nation's 
affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be 
maintained except by a partnership of democratic 
nations. No autocratic government could be 
trusted to keep faith within it or observe its 
covenants. It must be a league of honor, a part- 
nership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals 
away; the plotting of inner circles who could 
plan what they would and render account to no 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 23 

one would be a corruption seated at its very 
heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose 
and their honor steady to a common end and 
prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow 
interest of their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance 
has been added to our hope for the future peace 
of the world by the wonderful and heartening- 
things that have been happening within the last 
few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by 
those who knew it best to have been always in 
fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits 
of her thought, in all the intimate relationships 
of her people that spoke their natural instinct, 
their habitual attitude toward life. Autocracy 
that crowned the summit of her political structure, 
long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality 
of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, 
character or purpose; and now it has been 
shaken off and the great, generous Russian 
people have been added in all their native ma- 
jesty and might to the forces that are fighting 
for freedom in the world, for justice, and for 
peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of 
Honor. 

One of the things that have served to convince 
us that the Prussian autocracy was not, and could 
never be our friend is that from the very outset 



24 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting 
communities and even our offices of government 
with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere 
afoot against our national unity of counsel, our 
peace within and without, our industries and our 
commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies 
were here even before the war began ; and it is 
unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact 
proved in our courts of justice that the intrigues 
which have more than once come perilously near 
to disturbing the peace and dislocating the in- 
dustries of the country have been carried on at 
the instigation, with the support, and even under 
the personal direction of official agents of the 
Imperial Government accredited to the Govern- 
ment of the United States. Even in checking 
these things and trying to extirpate them we have 
sought to put the most generous interpretation 
possible upon them because we knew that their 
source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose 
of the German people toward us (who were, no 
doubt as ignorant of them as we ourselves were), 
but only in the selfish designs of a Government 
that did what it pleased and told its people 
nothing. But they have played their part in serv- 
ing to convince us at last that that Government 
entertains no real friendship for us and means to 
act against our peace and security at its conveni- 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 25 

ence. That it means to stir up enemies against 
up at our very doors, the intercepted note to the 
German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evi- 
dence. 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile pur- 
pose because we know that in such a govern- 
ment, following such methods, we can never have 
a friend; and that in the presence of its or- 
ganized power, always lying in wait to accom- 
plish we know not what purpose, there can be 
no assured security for the democratic govern- 
ments of the world. We are now about to 
accept the gauge of battle with this natural foe 
to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole 
force of the nation to check and nullify its pre- 
tensions and its power. We are glad, now that 
we see the facts with no veil of false pretense 
about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace 
of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, 
the German people included : for the rights of 
nations great and small and the privilege of 
men everywhere to choose their way of life and 
of obedience. The world must be made safe 
for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon 
the trusted foundations of political liberty. We 
have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemni- 
ties for ourselves, no material compensation for 



26 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but 
one of the champions of the rights of mankind. 
We shall be satisfied when those rights have been 
made as secure as the faith and the freedom of 
the nation can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancour and with- 
out selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves 
but what we shall wish to share with all free peo- 
ples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our opera- 
tions as belligerents without passion and our- 
selves observe with proud punctilio the principles 
of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting 
for. 

I have said nothing- of the governments allied 
with the Imperial Government of Germany be- 
cause they have not made war upon us or chal- 
lenged us to defend our right and our honor. 
The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, 
avowed its unqualified indorsement and acceptance 
of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare 
adopted now without disguise by the Imperial 
German Government, and it has therefore not 
been possible for this Government to receive 
Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently ac- 
credited to this Government by the Imperial and 
Royal Government of Austria-Hungary ; but that 
Government has not actually engaged in warfare 
against citizens of the United States on the seas, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 27 

and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of 
postponing- a discussion of our relations with the 
authorities at Vienna. We enter this war only 
where we are clearly forced into it, because there 
are no other means of defending our rights. 

It will be all the easier for us to conduct our- 
selves as bellig^erents in a high spirit of right and 
fairness because we act without animus, not in 
enmity toward a people or with the desire to 
bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but 
only in armed opposition to an irresponsible gov- 
ernment which has thrown aside all considera- 
tions of humanity and of right and is running 
amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere 
friends of the German people, and shall desire 
nothing so much as the early re-establishment of 
intimate relations of mutual advantage between 
us, — however hard it may be for them, for the 
time being to believe that this is spoken from 
our hearts. We have borne with their present 
government through all these bitter months be- 
cause of that friendship, — exercising a patience 
and forbearance which would otherwise have 
been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an 
opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily 
attitude and actions toward the millions of men 
and women of German birth and native sympathy 
who live amongst us and share our life, and we 



28 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

shall be proud to prove it toward all who are in 
fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Govern- 
ment in the hour of test. They are, most of them, 
as true and loyal Americans as if they had never 
known any other fealty or allegiance. They will 
be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and re- 
straining the few who may be of a different mind 
and purpose. If there should be disloyalty it will 
be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression ; 
but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only 
here and there and without countenance except 
from a lawless and malignant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty. Gentle- 
men of the Congress, which I have performed in 
thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many 
months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. 
It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful 
people into war, into the most terrible and dis- 
astrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to 
be in the balance. But the right is more precious 
than peace, and we shall fight for the things 
which we have always carried nearest our hearts, 
— for democracy, for the right of those who sub- 
mit to authority to have a voice in their own gov- 
ernments, for the rights and liberties of small na- 
tions, for a universal dominion of right by such 
a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and 
safety to all nations and make the world itself 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 29 

at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our 
lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and 
everything that we have, with the pride of those 
who know that the day has come when America is 
privileged to spend her blood and her might for 
the principles that gave her birth and happiness 
and the peace which she has treasured. God 
helping her, she can do no other. 



MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 
Hon. Woodrow Wilson. 



Delivered at the National Cemetery, 
Arlington, Virginia, May 30th, 1917 



MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 
WooDROW Wilson 
The program has conferred an unmerited dig- 
nity upon the remarks I am going to make by 
calHng them an address, because I am not here 
to dehver an address. I am here merely to show 
in my official capacity the sympathy of this 
great government with the object of this occa- 
sion, and also to speak just a word of the senti- 
ment that is in my own heart. 

Any Memorial Day of this sort is, of course, 
a day touched with sorrowful memory, and yet 
I for one do not see how we can have any 
thought of pity for the men whose memory we 
honor to-day. I do not pity them. I envy them, 
rather, because theirs is a great work for liberty 
accomplished and we are in the midst of a work 
unfinished, testing our strength where their 
strength has already been tested. 

There is a touch of sorrow, but there is a 
touch of reassurance also in a day like this, 
because we know how the men of America have 
responded to the call of the cause of liberty, 
and it fills our mind with a perfect assurance that 
that response will come again in equal measure, 
with equal majesty, and with a result which will 
hold the attention of all mankind. 

When you reflect upon it these men who died 
33 



34 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

to preserve the Union died to preserve the instru- 
ment which we are now using to serve the world 
— a free nation espousing the cause of human Hb- 
erty. In one sense the great struggle into which 
we have now entered is an American struggle, 
because it is in the sense of American rights, 
but it is something even greater than that, it is 
a world struggle. 

It is a struggle of men who love liberty every- 
where, and in this cause America will show her- 
self greater than ever, because she will rise to 
a greater thing. 

We have said in the beginning that we planned 
this great government that men who wish free- 
dom might have a place of refuge and a place 
where their hope could be realized and now, 
having established such a government, having 
preserved such a government, having vindicated 
the power of such a government, we are saying 
to all mankind, "We did not set this government 
up in order that we might have a selfish and sep- 
arate liberty, for we are now ready to come to 
your assistance and fight out upon the fields of 
the world the cause of human liberty." In this 
thing America attains her full dignity and the 
full fruition of her purpose. 

No man can be glad that such things have hap- 
pened as we have witnessed in these last fateful 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 35 

years, but perhaps it may be permitted to us 
to be glad that we have an opportunity to show 
the principles that we profess to be living, prin- 
ciples that live in our hearts, and to have a 
chance by the pouring out of our blood and treas- 
ure to vindicate the things which we have pro- 
fessed. 

For, my friends, the real fruition of life is to do 
the things we have said we wished to do. There 
are times when words seem empty and only ac- 
tion seems great. Such a time has come, and in 
the providence of God America will once more 
have an opportunity to show the world she was 
born to serve mankind. 



FLAG DAY ADDRESS 
Hon. Woodrow Wilson 



Delivered at Washington, D. C, 
June 14th, 1917 



<l 



FLAG DAY ADDRESS 
WooDROW Wilson 



My Fellow Citizens : 

We meet to celebrate Flag Day because th>s 
fla.. which we honor and under which we serve 
is "the emblem of our unity, our power, our 
thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other 
character than that which we give it from gen- 
eration to generation. The choices are ours, 
utats in majestic silence above the hosts that 
execute those choices, whether in peace or m 
war. And yet, though silent, it speaks to us,- 
speaks to us of the past, of the men and women 
who went before us and of the records they wrote 
upon it. We celebrate the day of its birth; and 
from its birth until now it has witnessed a great 
history, has floated on high the symbol of great 
events, of a great plan of life worked oiit by a 
great people. We are about to carry it into 
battle, to lift it where it will draw the fire of our 
enemies. We are about to bid thousands, hun- 
dreds of thousands, it may be millions, of our 
men, the young, the strong, the capable men of 
the nation, to go forth and die beneath it on 
fields of blood far away,-for what? For some 
unaccustomed thing? For something for which 
it has never sought the fire before? American 
armies were never before sent across the seas. 



39 



40 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

Why are they sent now ? For some new purpose, 
for which this great flag- has never been carried 
before, or for some old, famihar, heroic purpose 
for which it has seen men, its own men, die on 
every battlefield upon which Americans have 
borne arms since the Revolution? 

These are questions which must be answered. 
We are Americans. We in our turn serve America, 
and can serve her with no private purpose. We 
must use her flag as she has always used it. We 
are accountable at the bar of history and must 
plead in utter frankness what purpose it is we 
seek to serve. 

It is plain enough how we were forced into 
the war. The extraordinary insults and aggres- 
sions of the Imperial German Government left 
us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms 
in defense of our rights as a free people and of 
our honor as a sovereign government. The mili- 
tary masters of Germany denied us the right to 
be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting com- 
munities with vicious spies and conspirators and 
sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in 
their own behalf. When they found that they 
could not do that, their agents diligently spread 
sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own 
citizens from their allegiance, — and some of 
those agents were men connected with the official 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 41 

Embassy of the German Government itself here 
in our own capital. They sought by violence to 
destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. 
They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms 
against us and to draw Japan into a hostile 
alliance with her,-and that, not by indirectmn, 
but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office 
in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use 
of the high seas and repeatedly executed their 
threat that they would send to their death any 
of our people who ventured to approach the 
coasts of Europe. And many of our own people 
were corrupted. ^len began to look upon their 
own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in 
their hot resentment and surprise whether there 
was any community in which hostile intrigue did 
not lurk. What great nation in such circum- 
stances would not have taken up arms? Much 
as we had desired peace, it was denied us, and 
not of our own choice. This flag under which 
we serve would have been dishonored had we 
■withheld our hand. 

But that is only part of the story. We know 
now as clearly as we knew before we were our- 
selves engaged that we are not the enemies of 
the German people and that they are not our ene- 
mies They did not originate or desire this 
hideous war or wish that we should be drawn 



42 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

into it ; and we are vaguely conscious that we are 
fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, 
as well as our own. They are themselves in the 
grip of the same sinister power that has now at 
last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood 
from us. The whole world is at war because the 
whole world is in the grip of that power and is 
trying out the great battle which shall determine 
whether it is to be brought under its mastery 
or fling itself free. 

The war was begun by the military masters 
of Germany, who proved to be also the masters 
of Austria-Hungary. These .men have never 
regarded nations as peoples, men, women, and 
children of like blood and frame as themselves, 
for whom governments existed and in whom 
governments had their life. They have regarded 
them merely as serviceable organizations which 
they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to 
their own purpose. They have regarded the 
smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who 
could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural 
tools and instruments of domination. Their pur- 
pose has long been avowed. The statesmen of 
other nations, to whom that purpose was incred- 
ible, paid little attention ; regarded what German 
professors expounded in their classrooms and 
German writers set forth to the world as the goal 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 43 

of German policy as rather the dream of minds 
detached from practical affairs, as preposterous 
private conceptions of German destiny, than as 
the actual plans of responsible rulers ; but the 
rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while 
what concrete plans, what well advanced in- 
trigues lay back of what the professors and the 
writers were saying, and were glad to go for- 
ward unmolested, filling ,the thrones of Balkan 
states with German princes, putting German 
officers at the service of Turkey to drill her 
armies and make interest with her government, 
developing plans of sedition and rebellion in 
India and Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. 
The demands made by Austria upon Servia 
were a mere single step in a plan which com- 
passed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bag- 
dad. They hoped those demands might not 
arouse Europe, but they meant to press them 
whether they did or not, for they thought them- 
selves ready for the final issue of arms. 

Their plan was to throw a broad belt of Ger- 
man military power and political control across 
the very centre of Europe and beyond the Medi- 
terranean into the heart of Asia ; and Austria- 
Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn 
as Servia or Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous 
states of the East. Austria-Hungary, indeed, was 



44 THE VOICES OE OUR LEADERS 

to become part of the central German Empire, 
absorbed and dominated by the same forces and 
influences that had originally cemented the Ger- 
man states themselves. The dream had its heart 
at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere 
else! It rejected the idea of solidarity of race 
entirely. The choice of peoples played no part 
in it at all. It contemplated binding together 
racial and political units which could be kept 
together only by force — Czechs, Magyars, 
Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, Armenians, — 
the proud states of Bohemia and Hungary, the 
stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, the 
indomitable Turks, the subtile peoples of the 
East. These peoples did not wish to be united. 
They ardently desired to direct their own afifairs, 
would be satisfied only by undisputed indepen- 
dence. They could be kept quiet only by the 
presence or the constant threat of armed men. 
They would live under a common power only 
by sheer compulsion and await the day of revolu- 
tion. But the German military statesmen had 
reckoned with all that and were ready to deal 
with it in their own way. 

And they have actually carried the greater 
part of that amazing plan into execution ! Look 
how things stand. Austria is at their mercy. 
It has acted, not upon its own initiative or upon 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 45 

the choice of its own people, but at Berhn's 
dictation ever since the war began. Its people 
now desire peace, but cannot have it until leave 
is granted from Berlin. The so-called Central 
Powers are in fact but a single Power. Servia 
is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a 
moment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its 
will, and Roumania is overrun. The Turkish 
armies, which Germans trained, are serving Ger- 
many, certainly not themselves, and the guns of 
German warships lying in the harbour at Con- 
stantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day 
that they have no choice but to take their orders 
from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian 
Gulf the net is spread. 

Is it not easy to understand the eagerness 
for peace that has been manifested from Berlin 
ever since the snare was set and sprung? Peace, 
peace, peace has been the talk of her Foreign 
Office for now a year and more ; not peace upon 
her own initiative, but upon the initiative of the 
nations over which she now deems herself to 
hold the advantage. A little of the talk has been 
public, but most of it has been private. Through 
all sorts of channels it has come to me, and in 
all sorts of guises, but never with the terms dis- 
closed which the German Government would be 
willing to accept. That government has other 



46 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

valuable pawns in its hands than those I have 
mentioned. It still holds a valuable part of 
France, though with slowly relaxing grasp, and 
practically the whole of Belgium. Its armies 
press close upon Russia and overrun Poland at 
their will. It cannot go further; it dare not go 
back. It wishes to close its bargain before it is 
too late and it has little left to ofifer for the 
pound of flesh it will demand. 

The military masters under whom Germany is 
bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has 
brought them. If they fall back or are forced 
back an inch, their power both abroad and at 
home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. 
It is their power at home they are thinking about 
now more than their power abroad. It is that 
power which is trembling under their very feet; 
and deep fear has entered their hearts. They 
have but one chance to perpetuate their military 
power or even their controlling political influence. 
If they can secure peace now with the immense 
advantages still in their hands which they have 
up to this point apparently gained, they will 
have justified themselves before the German peo- 
ple: they will have gained by force what they 
promised to gain by it; an immense expansion 
of German power, an immense enlargement of 
German industrial and commercial opportunities. 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS A7 

Their prestige will be secure, and with their 
prestige their political power. If they fail, their 
people will thrust them aside; a government ac- 
countable to the people themselves will be set 
up in Germany as it has been in England, in 
the United States, in France, and in all the great 
countries of the modern time except Germany. 
If they succeed they are safe and Germany and 
the world are undone; if they fail Germany is 
saved and the world will be at peace. If they 
succeed, America will fall within the menace. 
We and all the rest of the world must remain 
armed, as they will remain, and must make ready 
for the next step in their aggression ; if they fail, 
the world may unite for peace and Germany may 
be of the union. 

Do you not now understand the new intrigue, 
the intrigue for peace, and why the masters of 
Germany do not hesitate to use any agency that 
promises to efifect their purpose, the deceit of 
the nations? Their present particular aim is 
to deceive all those who throughout the world 
stand for the rights of peoples and the self- 
government of nations; for they see what im- 
mense strength the forces of justice and of liber- 
alism are gathering out of this war. They are 
employing liberals in their enterprise. They are 
using men, in Germany and without, as their 



48 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

Spokesmen whom they have hitherto despised and 
oppressed, using them for their own destruction,, 
— sociaUsts, the leaders of labour, the thinkers 
they have hitherto sought to silence. Let them 
once succeed and these men, now their tools, will 
be ground to powder beneath the weight of the 
great military empire they will have set up ; the 
revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all 
succor or co-operation in western Europe and a 
counter revolution fostered and supported ; Ger- 
many herself will lose her chance of freedom; 
and all Europe will arm for the next, the final 
struggle. 

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively 
conducted in this country than in Russia and in 
every country in Europe to which the agents 
and dupes of the Imperial German Government 
can get access. That government has many 
spokesmen here, in places high and low. They 
have learned discretion. They keep within the 
law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. 
They proclaim the liberal purposes of their mas- 
ters ; declare this a foreign war which can touch 
America with no danger to either her lands Or 
her institutions ; set England at the center of 
the stage and talk of her ambition to assert 
economic dominion throughout the world ; appeal 
to our ancient tradition of isolation in the politics 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 49 

of the nations ; and seek to undermine the gov- 
ernment with false professions of loyalty to its 
principles. 

But they will make no headway. The false 
betray themselves always in every accent. It is 
only friends and partisans of the German Gov- 
ernment whom we have already identified who 
utter these thinly disguised disloyalties. The 
facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere 
are they more plainly seen than in the United 
States, where we are accustomed to deal with 
facts and not with sophistries ; and the great 
fact that stands out above all the rest is that 
this is a Peoples' War, a war for freedom and 
justice and self-government amongst all the na- 
tions of the world, a war to make the world safe 
for the peoples who live upon it and have made 
it their own, the German people themselves in- 
cluded ; and that with us rests the choice to break 
through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats 
and masks of brute force and help set the world 
free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated 
a long age through by sheer weight of arms and 
the arbitrarv choices of self-constituted masters, 
by the nation which can maintain the biggest 
armies and the most irresistible armaments, — a 
power to which the world has afforded no paral- 



50 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

lei and in the face of which poHtical freedom 
must whither and perish. 

For us there is but one choice. We have made 
it. Woe be to the man or group of men that 
seeks to stand in our way in this day of high 
resolution when every principle we hold dearest 
is to be vindicated and made secure for the sal- 
vation of the nations. We are ready to plead 
at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a 
new lustre. Once more we shall make good with 
our lives and fortunes the great faith to which 
we were born, and a new glory shall shine in 
the face of our people. 



II 



WHY DO WE FIGHT GERMANY? 

Hon. Franklin K. Lane, 
Secretary of the Interior 



Delivered before the Home Club, Interior Depart- 
ment, Washington, D. C, June 4th, 1917. 



WHY DO WE FIGHT GERMANY? 
Franklin K. Lane 

Tomorrow is registration day. It is the duty 
of all, their legal as well as their patriotic duty, 
to register if within the class called. There are 
some who have not clearly seen the reason for 
that call. To these I would speak a word. 

Why are we fighting Germany? The brief 
answer is that ours is a war of self-defense. We 
did not wish to fight Germany. She made the 
attack upon us; not on our shores, but on our 
ships, our 'lives, our rights, our future. For two 
years and more we held to a neutrality that made 
us apologists for things which outraged man's 
common sense of fair play and humanity. At each 
new offense— the invasion of Belgium, the kill- 
ing of civilian Belgians, the attacks on Scar- 
borough and other defenseless towns, the laying 
of mines in neutral waters, the fencing off of 
the seas— and on and on through the months 
we said : "This is war— archaic, uncivilized war, 
but war ! All rules have been thrown away ; all 
nobility; man hag come down to the primitive 
brute. And while we cannot justify we will not 
intervene. It is not our war." 

Then why are we in? Because we could not 
keep out. The invasion of Belgium, which 
opened the war, led to the invasion of the United 
53 



54 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

States by slow, steady, logical steps. Our sym- 
pathies evolved into a conviction of self-interest. 
Our love of fair play ripened into alarm at our 
own peril. 

We talked in the language and in the spirit 
of good faith and sincerity, as honest men should 
talk, until we discovered that our talk was con- 
strued as cowardice. And Mexico was called 
upon to cow us. We talked as men would talk 
who cared alone for peace and the advancement 
of their own material interests, until we discov- 
ered that we were thought to be a nation of 
mere money makers, devoid of all character — 
until, indeed, we are told that we could not 
walk the highways of the world without permis- 
sion of a Prussian soldier, that our ships might 
not sail without wearing a striped uniform of 
humiliation upon a narrow path of national sub- 
servience. We talked as men talk who hope for 
honest agreement, not for war, until we found 
that the treaty torn to pieces at Liege was but 
the symbol of a policy that made agreements 
worthless against a purpose that knew no word 
but success. 

And so we came into this war for ourselves. 
It is a war to save America — to preserve self- 
respect, to justify our right to live as we have 
lived, not as some one else wishes us to live. In 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 55 

the name of freedom we challenge with ships 
and men, money, and an undaunted spirit, that 
word "Verboten" which Germany has written 
upon the sea and upon the land. For America is 
not the name of so much territory. It is a living 
spirit, born in travail, grown in the rough school 
of bitter experiences, a living spirit which has 
purpose and pride and conscience — knows why 
it wishes to live and to what end, knows how it 
comes to be respected of the world, and hopes 
to retain that respect by living on with the light 
of Lincoln's love of man as its old and new testa- 
ment. It is more precious that this America 
should live than that we Americans should live. 
And this America as we now see has been chal- 
lenged from the first of this war by the strong 
arm of a power that has no sympathy with our 
purpose, and will not hesitate to destroy us if 
the law that we respect, the rights that are to us 
sacred, or the spirit that we have, stand across 
her set will to make this world bow before her 
policies, backed by her organized and scientific 
military system. The world of Christ — a neg- 
lected but not a rejected Christ — has come again 
face to face with the world of Mahomet, who 
willed to win by force. 

With this background of history and in this 
sense, then we fight Germany — 



56 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

Because of Belgium — invaded, outraged, en- 
slaved, impoverished Belgium. We cannot for- 
get Liege, Louvain, and Cardinal Mercier. Trans- 
lated into terms of American history these names 
stand for Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Patrick 
Henry. 

Because of France — invaded, desecrated 
France, a million of whose heroic sons have died 
to save the land of LaFayette. Glorious golden 
France, the preserver of the arts, the land of 
noble spirit. The first land to follow our lead 
into republican liberty. 

Because of England — from whom came the 
laws, traditions, standards of life, and inherent 
love of liberty which we call Anglo-Saxon civil- 
ization. We defeated her once upon the land and 
once upon the sea. But Australia, New Zealand, 
Africa, and Canada are free because of what we 
did. And they are with us in the fight for the 
freedom of the seas. 

Because of Russia — New Russia. She must 
not be overwhelmed now. Not now, surely, 
when she is just born into freedom. Her peasants 
must have their chance; they must go to school 
to Washington, to Jefferson, and to Lincoln, 
until they know their way about in the new, 
strange world, of government by the popular 
will. 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 57 

Because of other peoples, with their rising 
Tiope that the world may be freed from govern- 
ment by the soldier. 

We are fighting Germany because she sought 
to terrorize us and then to fool us. We could 
not believe that Germany would do what she 
said she would do upon the seas. 

We still hear the piteous cries of children 
<:oming up out of the sea where the Lusitania 
went down. And Germany has never asked for- 
giveness of the world. 

We saw the Sussex sunk, crowded with the 
sons and daughters of neutral nations. 

We saw ship after ship sent to the bottom 
— ships of mercy bound out of America for the 
Belgian starving; ships carrying the Red Cross 
and laden with the wounded of all nations ; ships 
carrying food and clothing to friendly, harmless, 
terrorized peoples ; ships flying the Stars and 
Stripes — sent to the bottom hundreds of miles 
from shore, manned by American seamen, mur- 
dered against all law, without warning. 

We believed Germany's promise that she would 
respect the neutral flag and the rights of neu- 
trals, and we held our anger and outrage in 
check. But now we see that she was holding 
us off with fair promises until she could build 
her hugh fleet of submarines. For when sprnig 



58 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

came she blew her promise into the air, just as 
at the beginning she had torn up that "scrap 
of paper." Then we saw clearly that there was 
but one law for Germany — her will to rule. 

We are fighting Germany because she violated 
our confidence. Paid German spies filled our 
cities. Officials of her Government, received as 
the guests of this Nation, lived with us to bribe 
and terrorize, defying our law and the law of 
nations. 

We are fighting Germany because while we 
were yet her friends — the only great power that 
still held hands ofif — she sent the Zimmermann 
note, calling to her aid Mexico, our southern 
neighbor, and hoping to lure Japan, our western 
neighbor, into war against this Nation of peace. 

The nation that would do these things pro- 
claims the gospel that government has no con- 
science. And this doctrine cannot live, or else 
democracy must die. For the nations of the 
world must keep faith. There can be no living 
for us in a world where the state has no con- 
science, no reverence for the things of the spirit, 
no respect for international law, no mercy for 
those who fall before its force. What an unor- 
dered world! Anarchy! The anarchy of rival 
wolf packs ! 

We are fighting Germany because in this war 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 59 

feudalism is making its last stand against on- 
coming democracy. We see it now. This is a 
war against an old spirit, an ancient, outworn 
spirit. It is a war against feudalism — the right 
of the castle on the hill to rule the village below. 
It is a war for democracy — the right of all to 
be their own masters. Let Germany be feudal 
if she will, but she must not spread her system 
over a world that has outgrown it. Feudalism 
plus science, thirteenth century plus twentieth 
— this is the religion of the mistaken Germany 
that has linked itself with the Turk, that has, 
too, adopted the method of Mahomet. ''The 
state has no conscience." "The state can do 
no wrong." With the spirit of the fanatic she 
believes this gospel and that it is her duty to 
spread it by force. With poison gas that makes 
living a hell, with submarines that sneak through 
the seas to slyly murder noncombatants, with 
dirigibles that bombard men and women while 
they sleep, with a perfected system of terroriza- 
tion that the modern world first heard of when 
German troops entered China, German feudal- 
ism is making war upon mankind. Let this 
old spirit of evil have its way and no man will 
live in America without paying toll to it in 
manhood and in money. This spirit might de- 
mand Canada from a defeated, navyless Eng- 



60 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

land, and then our dream of peace on the north 
would be at an end. We would live, as France 
has Hved for 40 years, in haunting terror. 

America speaks for the world in fighting Ger- 
many. Mark on a map those countries which 
are Germany's allies and you will mark but four, 
running from the Baltic through Austria and 
Bulgaria to Turkey. All the other nations the 
whole globe around are in arms against her or 
are unable to move. There is deep meaning in 
this. We fight with the world for an honest 
world in which nations keep their word, for a 
world in which nations do not live by swagger 
or by threat, for a world in which men think of 
the ways in which they can conquer the common 
cruelties of nature instead of inventing more 
horrible cruelties to inflict upon the spirit and 
body of man, for a world in which the ambition 
or the philosophy of a few shall not make miser- 
able all mankind, for a world in which the man 
is held more precious than the machine, the sys- 
tem, or the state. 



ADDRESS TO THE RESERVE OFFICERS' 
TRAINING CORPS 

Hon. Robert Lansing, 
Secretary of State 



Delivered at Madison Barracks, New York, 
July 29th, 1917 



ADDRESS TO THE RESERVE OFFICERS' 
TRAINING CORPS 

Robert Lansing 

Gentlemefi: It is an opportunity which I 
greatly appreciate to be here this evening and to 
say a few words to you about the great enter- 
prise in which you are to be participants. There 
are so many things to be said, so many view- 
points, that it is hard to know how to deal with 
the subject in a way that will appeal to the 
greatest number. 

First, we must all realize that we are living 
in the most momentous time in all history, in 
a time when the lives and destinies of nations 
are in the balance, when even the civilization, 
which has taken centuries to build, may crumble 
before the terrible storm which is sweeping over 
Europe. We are not only living in this critical 
period but we, as a nation, have become a par- 
ticipant in Kie struggle. Having cast our lot on 
the side of the powers allied against the Imperial 
German Government we will put behind our de- 
cision the full power and the resources of the 
Republic. We intend to win in this mighty conflict, 
and we will win because our cause is the cause 
of justice and of right and of humanity. 
63 



64 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

I wonder how many of us comprehend what 
the outcome of this war means to mankind, or, 
to bring it nearer to each one of us, what it 
means to our country. I sometimes think that 
there prevail very erroneous impressions as to 
the reasons why we entered the war, not the 
immediate reasons, but the deep underlying- rea- 
sons which affect the life and future of the 
United States and of all other liberty-loving na- 
tions throughout the world. 

Of course the immediate cause of our war 
against Germany was the announced purpose of 
the German Government to break its promises 
as to indiscriminate submarine warfare and the 
subsequent renewal of that ruthless method of 
destruction with increased vigor and brutality. 

While this cause was in itself sufficient to force 
us to enter the war if we would preserve our 
self-respect, the German Government's deliberate 
breach of faith and its utter disregard of right 
and life had a far deeper meaning, a meaning 
which had been growing more evident as the war 
had progressed and which needed but this act 
of perfidy to bring it home to all thinking Ameri- 
cans. The evil character of the German Govern- 
ment is laid bare before the world. We know 
now that that Government is inspired with am- 
bitions which menace human liberty, and that 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 65 

to gain its end it does not hesitate to break 
faith, to violate the most sacred rights, or to 
prepetrate intolerable acts of inhumanity. 

It needed but the words reported to have been 
uttered by the German Chancellor to complete 
the picture of the character of his Government 
when he announced that the only reason why the 
intensified submarine campaign was delayed until 
February last was that sufficient submarines 
could not be built before that time to make the 
attacks on commerce effective. Do you realize 
that this means, if it means anything, that the 
promises to refrain from brutal submarine war- 
fare, which Germany had made to the United 
States, were never intended to be kept, that they 
were only made in order to gain time in which 
to build more submarines, and that when the 
time came to act the German promises were un- 
hesitatingly torn to pieces like other '^scraps of 
paper" ? 

It is this disclosure of the character of the 
Imperial German Government which is the under- 
lying cause of our entry into the war. We had 
doubted, or at least many Americans had doubted, 
the evil purposes of the rulers of Germany. Doubt 
remained no longer. In the light of events we 
could read the past and see that for a quarter 
of a century the absorbing ambition of the mili- 



66 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

tary oligarchy which was the master of the Ger- 
man Empire was for world dominion. Every 
agency in the fields of commerce, industry, 
science and diplomacy had been directed by the 
German Government to this supreme end. Phil- 
osophers and preachers taught that the destiny of 
Germany was to rule the world, thus preparing 
the mind of the German people for the time when 
the mighty engine which the German Govern- 
ment had constructed should crush all opposition 
and the German Emperor should rule supreme. 

For nearly three years we have watched the 
conduct of the Imperial Government, and we 
have learned more and more of the character 
of that Government and of its aims. We came 
very slowly to a realizing sense that not only 
was the freedom of the European nations at stake, 
but the liberty throughout the world was threat- 
ened by the powerful autocracy which was seek- 
ing to gratify its vast ambition. 

Not impulsively, but with deliberation, the 
American people reached the only decision which 
was possible from the standpoint of their own 
national safety. Congress declared that a state 
of war existed between the United States and the 
Imperial Government of Germany, and this coun- 
try united with the other liberal nations of the 
earth to crush the power which sought to erect 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 67 

on the ruins of democracy a world empire 
greater than that of Greece or Rome of the 
CaHphs. 

The President has said, with the wonderful 
ability which he has to express aptly a great 
thought in a single phrase that "the world must 
be made safe for democracy." In that thought 
there is more than the establishment of liberty 
and self-government for all nations, there is in 
it the hope of an enduring peace. 

I do not know in the annals of history an 
instance where a people, with truly democratic 
institutions, permitted their government to wage 
a war of aggression, a war of conquest. Faithful 
to their treaties, sympathetic with others seeking 
self-development, real democracies, whether mon- 
archical or republican in their forms of govern- 
ment, desire peace with their neighbors and with 
all mankind. 

Were every people on earth able to express 
their will there would be no wars of aggression, 
and if there were no wars of aggression then 
there would be no wars, and lasting peace would 
come to this earth. The only way that a people 
can express their will is through democratic in- 
stitutions. Therefore, when the world is made 
safe for democracy, when that great principle 



68 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

prevails, universal peace will be an accomplished 
fact. 

No nation or people will benefit more than the 
United States when that time comes. But it 
has not yet come. A great people, ruled in thought 
and word, as well as in deed, by the most sin- 
ister government of modern times, is straining 
every nerve to supplant democracy by the au- 
tocracy which they have been taught to worship. 
When will the German people awaken to the 
truth? When will they arise in their might and 
cast off the yoke and become their own masters ? 
I fear that it will not be until a physical might 
of the united democracies of the world have 
destroyed forever the evil ambition of the military 
rulers of Germany, and liberty triumphs over its 
arch enemies. 

And yet in spite of these truths which have 
been brought to light in these last three years 
I wonder how many Americans feel that our 
democracy is in peril, that our liberty needs pro- 
tection, that the United States is in real danger 
from the malignant forces which are seeking to 
impose their will upon the world, as they have 
upon Germany and her deceived allies. 

Let us understand once for all that this is no 
war to establish an abstract principle of right. 
It is a war in which the future of the United 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 69 

States is at stake. If any among you have the 
idea that we are fighting others' battles and not 
our own, the sooner he gets away from that idea 
the better it will be for him, the better it will be 
for all of us. 

Imagine Germany victor in Europe because 
the United States remained neutral. Who, then, 
think you, would be the next victim of those who 
are seeking to be masters of the whole earth? 
Would not this country with its enormous wealth 
arouse the cupidity of an impoverished though 
triumphant Germany? Would not this democ- 
racy be the only obstacle between the autocratic 
rulers of Germany and their supreme ambition? 
Do you think that they would withhold their 
hand from so rich a prize ? 

Let me then ask you, would it be easier or 
wiser for this country single-handed to resist a 
German Empire, flushed with victory and with 
great armies and navies at its command, than 
to unite with the brave enemies of that Empire 
in ending now and for all time this menace to 
our future? 

Primarily, then, every man who crosses the 
ocean to fight on foreign soil against the armies 
of the German Emperor goes forth to fight for 
his country and for the preservation of those 
things for which our forefathers were willing to 



70 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

die. To those who thus offer themselves we owe 
the same debt that we owe to those men who in 
the past fought on American soil in the cause 
of liberty. No, not the same debt, but a greater 
one. It calls for more patriotism, more self- 
denial, and a truer vision to wage war on distant 
shores than to repel an invader or defend one's 
home. I, therefore, congratulate you, young 
men, in your choice of service. You have done 
a splendid thing. You have earned already the 
gratitude of your countrymen and of generations 
of Americans to come. Your battle flags will 
become the cherished trophies of a nation which 
will never forget those who bore them in the 
cause of liberty. 

I know that some among you may consider 
that the idea tHat Germany would attack us, if 
she won this war, to be improbable ; but let him 
who doubts remember that the improbable, yes, 
the impossible, has been happening in this war 
from the beginning. If you had been told prior 
to August, 1914, that the German Government 
would disregard its solemn treaties and send its 
armies into Belgium, would wantonly burn Lou- 
vain, would murder defenseless people, would 
extort ransoms from conquered cities, would, 
carry away men and women into slavery, would 
like vandals of old, destroy some of history's 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 71 

most cherished monuments, and would with ma- 
licious purpose lay waste the fairest fields of 
France and Belgium, you would have indignantly 
denied the possibility. You would have exclaimed 
that Germans, lovers of art and learning, would 
never permit such foul deeds. Today you know 
that the unbelievable has happened, that all these 
crimes have been committed, not under the im- 
pulse of passion but under official orders. 

Again, if you had been told before the war that 
German submarine commanders would sink 
peaceful vessels of commerce and send to sudden 
death men, women, and little children, you would 
have declared such scientific brutality to be im- 
possible. Or if you had been told that German 
aviators would fly over thickly populated cities, 
scattering missiles of death and destruction, with 
no other purpose than to terrorize the innocent 
inhabitants, you would have denounced the very 
thought as unworthy of belief and as a calumny 
upon German honor. Yet, God help us, these 
things have come to pass, and iron crosses have 
rewarded the perpetrators. 

But there is more, far more, which might be 
added to this record of unbelievable things which 
the German Government has done. I only need 
to mention the attempt of the Foreign Office at 
Berlin to bribe Mexico to make war upon us by 



72 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

promising her American territory. It was only 
one of many intrigues which the German Gov- 
ernment was carrying on in many lands. Spies 
and conspirators were sent throughout the world. 
Civil discord was encouraged to weaken the po- 
tential strength of nations which might be ob- 
stacles to the lust of Germany's rulers for world 
mastery. Those of German blood who owed 
allegiance to other countries were appealed to 
to support the Fatherland, which beloved name 
masked the military clique at Berlin. 

Some day I hope that the whole tale may be 
told. It will be an astounding tale indeed. But 
enough has been told, so that there no longer 
remains the shadow of a doubt as to the character 
of Germany's rulers, of their amazing ambition 
for world empire, and of their intense hatred 
for democracy. 

The day has gone by when we can measure 
possibilities by past experiences or when we be- 
lieve that any physical obstacle is so great or 
any moral influence is so potent as to cause the 
German autocracy to abandon its mad purpose 
of world conquest. 

It was the policy of those, who plotted and 
made ready for the time to accomplish the desire 
of the German rulers, to lull into false security 
the great nations which they intended to subdue, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 73 

SO that when the storm broke they would be 
unprepared. How well they succeeded you know. 
But democracy no longer sleeps. It is fully 
awake to the menace which threatens it. The 
American people, trustful and friendly, were re- 
luctant to believe that imperialism again threat- 
ened the peace and liberty of the world. Con- 
viction came to them at last, and with it prompt 
action. The American Nation arrayed itself with 
the other great democracies of the earth against 
the genius of evil which broods over the destinies 
of Central Europe. 

No thought of material gain and no thought 
of material loss impelled this action. Inspired 
by the highest motives, American manhood pre- 
pared to risk all for the right. I am proud of 
my country. I am proud of my countrymen. I 
am proud of our national character. With lofty 
purpose, with patriotic fervor, with intense earn- 
estness the American democracy has drawn the 
sword, which it will not sheathe until the baneful 
forces of absolutism go down defeated and 
broken. 

Who can longer doubt — and there have been 
many who have doubted in these critical days — 
the power of that eternal spirit of freedom which 
lives in every true American heart? 

My friends, I am firmly convinced that the 



74 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

independence of no nation is safe, that the liberty 
of no individual is sure, until the military despot- 
ism which holds the German people in the hollow 
of its hand has been made impotent and harmless 
forever. Appeals to justice, to moral obligation, 
to honor, no longer avail with such a power. 
There is but one way to restore peace to the 
world and that is by overcoming the physical 
might of German imperialism by force of arms. 

For its own safety as well as for the cause of 
human liberty this great Republic is marshaling 
its armies and preparing with all its vigor to aid 
in ridding Germany, as well as the world, of the 
most ambitious and most unprincipled autocracy 
which has arisen to stay the wheels of progress 
and imperial Christian civilization. 

It is to this great cause you, who are present 
here tonight, like thousands of other loyal 
Americans, have dedicated yourselves. Upon 
each one of you much depends. You are going 
forth into foreign lands, not only as guardians 
of the flag of your country and of the liberties 
of your countrymen, but as guardians of the 
national honor of the United States. American 
character will be judged by your conduct ; Ameri- 
can spirit, by your deeds. As you maintain your- 
selves courageously and honorably, so will you 
bring glory to the flag which we all love as the 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 75 

emblem of our national unity and independence. 

I know that it is unnecessary to emphasize the 
responsibilities which will rest upon you as you 
lead the men under your command. To their 
officers they will look for guidance and example 
not only in the battle line, but in the camp and 
on the march. Your responsibilities are great. 
As you meet them so will your services be meas- 
ured by your country. 

It is in the toil and danger of so great an ad- 
venture as you are soon to experience that a 
man's true character will become manifest. He 
will be brought face to face with the realities. 
The little things which once engrossed his 
thought and called forth his energies will be 
forgotten in the stern events of his new life. 
The sternness of it all will not deprive him of 
the satisfaction which comes from doing his 
best. As he found gratification and joy in the 
peaceful pursuits of the old life, so will he find 
a deeper gratification and greater joy in serving 
his country loyally and doing his part in molding 
the future aright. 

And, when your task is completed, when the 
grim days of battle are over and you return once 
more to the quiet life of your profession or occu- 
pation, which you have so generously abandoned 
at your country's call, you will find in the grati- 



7e THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

tude of your countrymen an ample reward for the 
great sacrifice which you have made. 

If enthusiasm and ardor can make success sure, 
then we, Americans, have no cause for anxiety, 
no reason to doubt the outcome of the conflict. 
But enthusiasm and ardor are not all. They must 
be founded on a profound conviction of the 
righteousness of our cause and on an impHcit 
faith that the God of Battles will strengthen the 
arm of him who fights for the right. In the time 
of stress and peril, when a man stands face to 
face with death and its most terrible forms, God 
will not desert him who puts his trust in Him. 
It is at such a time that the eternal verities will 
be disclosed. It is then, when you realize that 
existence is more than this life and that over 
our destinies watches' an all-powerful and com- 
passionate God, you will stand amidst the storm 
of battle unflinching and unafraid. 

There is no higher praise that can be be- 
stowed upon a soldier of the Republic than to 
say that he served his country faithfully, and 
trusted in his God. Such I hope will be the 
praise which each one of you will be entitled to 
when peace returns to this suffering earth, and 
mankind rejoices that the world is made safe for 
democracy. 



A TRIBUTE TO AMERICA 

Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith, 
Formerly Prime Minister of Great Britain 



Delivered in House of Parliament, 
April 17th, 1917 



A TRIBUTE TO AMERICA 
Herbert Henry Asquith 

It is only right and fitting that this House, the 
chief representative body of the British Empire, 
should at the earliest possible opportunity give 
definite and emphatic expression to the feelings 
which throughout the length and breadth of the 
Empire have grown day by day in volume and 
fervor since the memorable decision of the Presi- 
dent and Congress of the United States. 

I doubt whether, even now, the world realizes 
the full significance of the step America has taken. 
I do not use language of flattery or exaggeration 
when I say it is one of the most disinterested 
acts in history. For more than 100 years it has 
been the cardinal principle of American policy 
to keep clear of foreign entanglements. A war 
such as this must necessarily dislocate interna- 
tional commerce and finance, but on the balance 
it was doing little appreciable harm to the ma- 
terial fortunes and prosperity of the American 
people. 

What, then, has enabled the President — after 
waiting with the patience which Pitt described as 
the first virtue of statesmanship — to carry with 
him a united nation into the hazards and horrors 
of the greatest war in history? 

Not calculation of material gain, not hope of 
79 



80 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

territorial aggrandizement, not even the pricking 
of one of those so-called points of honor which 
in days gone by have driven nations, as they 
used to drive individuals, to the duelling ground. 

It was the constraining force of conscience 
and humanity, growing in strength and compul- 
sive authority month by month, with the gradual 
unfolding of the real character of German aims 
and methods. It was that force alone which 
brought home to the great democracy overseas 
the momentous truth that they were standing 
at the parting ways. The American nation had 
to make one of those great decisions which in the 
lives of men and nations determine for good or 
ill their whole future. 

What was it that our kinsmen in America 
realized as the issue in this unexampled conflict? 
The very things which, if we are worthy of our 
best traditions, we are bound to vindicate — essen- 
tial conditions of free and honorable development 
of the nations of the world, humanity, respect 
for law, consideration for the weak and unpro- 
tected, chivalry toward mankind, observance of 
good faith — these things, which we used to regard 
as commonplaces of international decency, one 
after another have been flouted, menaced, trodden 
under foot, as though they were effete supersti- 
tions of a bygone creed. 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 81 

America sees in this clear issue something of 
wider import than the vicissitudes of the battle- 
fields, or even of a rearrangement of the map of 
Europe on the basis of nationality. 

The whole future of civilized government and 
intercourse, in particular the fortunes and faith 
of democracy, has been brought into peril. In 
such a situation aloofness is seen to be not only 
a blunder, but a crime. To stand aside with 
stopped ears, with folded arms, with averted 
gaze, when you have the power to intervene, is 
to become not a mere spectator, but an accom- 
plice. 

There was never in the minds of any of us a 
fear that the moment the issue became apparent 
and unmistakable the voice of America would 
not be heard. She has now dedicated herself 
without hesitation or reserve, heart and soul and 
strength, to the greatest of causes, to which, 
stimulated and fortified by her comradeship, we 
here renew our fealty and devotion. 



il 



THE OLDEST FREE ASSEMBLIES 

Right Honorable Arthur James Balfour, For- 
merly Prime Minister of Great Britain, Head 
of the British Mission to the United States. 



Delivered in the United States House of Represen- 
tatives, May 5th, 1917. 






i 



THE OLDEST FREE ASSEMBLIES 
Arthur James Balfour 

Mr. Speaker, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 
House of Representatives: Will you permit me 
on behalf of my friends and myself, to offer you 
my deepest and sincerest thanks for the rare and 
valued honor which you have done us by re- 
ceiving us here today? 

We all feel the greatness of this honor; but 
I think to none of us can it come home so closely 
as to one who, like myself, has been for 43 years 
in the service of a free assembly like your own. 
I rejoice to think that a member— a very old 
member, I am sorry to say— of the British House 
of Commons has been received here today by this 
great sister assembly with such kindness as you 
have shown to me and to my friends. 

Ladies and gentlemen, these two assemblies 
are the greatest and the oldest of the free assem- 
bhes now governing great nations in the world. 
The history indeed of the two is very different. 
The beginnings of the British House of Com- 
mons go back to a dim historic past, and its full 
rights and status have only been conquered and 
permanently secured after centuries of political 
struggle. 

Your fate has been a happier one. You were 
called into existence at a much later stage of 
85 



86 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

social development. You came into being com- 
plete and perfected and all your powers deter- 
mined, and your place in the Constitution secured 
beyond chance of revolution ; but, though the his- 
tory of these two great assemblies is different, 
each of them represents the great democratic prin- 
ciple to which we look forward as the security 
for the future peace of the world. 

All of the free assemblies now to be found 
governing the great nations of the earth have 
been modeled either upon your practice or upon 
ours or upon both combined. 

Mr. Speaker, the compliment paid to the mis- 
sion from Great Britain by such an assembly and 
upon such an occasion is one not one of us is 
ever likely to forget. But there is something, 
after all, even deeper and more significant in the 
circumstances under which I now have the honor 
to address you than any which arise out of the 
interchange of courtesies, however sincere, be- 
tween the great and friendly nations. 

We all, I think, feel instinctively that this is 
one of the great moments in the history of the 
world, and that what is now happening on both 
sides of the Atlantic represents the drawing to- 
gether of great and free peoples for mutual pro- 
tection against the aggression of military des- 
potism. 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 87 

I am not one of those, and none of you are 
among those, who are such bad democrats as to 
say that democracies make no mistakes. All free 
assemblies have made blunders : sometimes they 
have committed crimes. 

Why is it, then, that we look forward to the 
spread of free institutions throughout the world, 
and especially among our present enemies, as 
one of the greatest guaranties of the future peace 
of the world? I will tell you, gentlemen, how 
it seems to me. It is quite true that the people 
and the representatives of the people may be 
betrayed by some momentary gust of passion into 
a policy which they ultimately deplore ; but it is 
only a military despotism of the German type 
which can, through generations if need be, pursue 
steadily, remorselessly, unscrupulously, the ap- 
palling object of dominating the civilization of 
mankind. 

And, mark you, this evil, this menace under 
which we are now suffering, is not one which 
diminishes with the growth of knowledge and 
the progress of material civilization, but, on the 
contrary, it increases with them. 

When I was young we used to flatter our- 
selves that progress inevitably meant peace, and 
that growth of knowledge was always accompa- 
nied, as its natural fruit, by the growth of good- 



88 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

will among the nations of the earth. Unhappily, 
we know better now, and we know there is such 
a thing in the world as a power which can with 
unvarying persistency focus all the resources of 
knowledge and of civilization into the one great 
task of making itself the moral and material 
master of the world. 

It is against that danger that we, the free 
peoples of western civilization, have banded our- 
selves together. It is in that great cause that 
we are going to fight, and are now fighting this 
very moment side by side. 

In that cause we shall surely conquer, and our 
children will look back to this fateful date as 
the one day from which democracies can feel 
secure that their progress, their civilization, their 
rivalry, if need be, will be conducted, not on 
German lines, but in that friendly and Christian 
spirit which really befits the age in which we 
live. 

Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, I beg most 
sincerely to »-epeat again how heartily I thank 
you for the cordial welcome which you have 
given us today, and to repeat my profound sense 
of the significance of this unique meeting. 



GREETINGS TO AMERICA 

M. Alexandre Felix Joseph Ribot, 
President of the French Council 



Delivered in the Chamber of Deputies, 
April 6th, 1917 



GREETINGS TO AMERICA 
Alexandre Felix Joseph Ribot 

Before the Chamber adjourns the Government 
asks it to address a cordial greeting to the great 
RepubHc of the United States. 

You have read the admirable message of Presi- 
dent Wilson. We all feel that something great, 
which exceeds the proportions of a political event, 
has been accomplished. 

It is an historic fact of unequalled importance 
— this entry into the war on the side of us 
and our allies by the most peaceful democracy 
in the world. After having done everything to 
affirm its attachment to peace, the great Amer- 
ican nation declares solemnly that it cannot 
remain neutral in this immense conflict between 
right and violence, between civilization and 
barbarism. It holds that honor requires it to 
take up the defiance flung at all rules of inter- 
national law so laboriously built up by the civil- 
ized nations. 

It declares at the same time that it is not fight- 
ing for self-interest, desires neither conquest nor 
compensation, intends only to help toward a vic- 
tory of the cause of law and liberty. 

The grandeur, the nobility, of this action is en- 
hanced by the simplicity and serenity of the lan- 
91 



92 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

guage of the illustrous leader of the great dem- 
ocracy. 

If the world had entertained the least doubt 
of the profound meaning of this war in which 
we are engaged, the message of the President of 
the United States would dissipate all obscurity. 
It makes apparent to all that the struggle is verily 
a struggle between the liberal spirit of modern 
societies and the spirit of oppression of societies 
still enslaved to military despotism. It is for this 
reason that the message rings in the depths of all 
hearts like a message of deliverance to the world. 

The people which, under the inspiration of the 
writings of our philosophers, declared its rights in 
the eighteenth century, the people who place 
Washington and Lincoln foremost among their 
heroes, the people who in the last century suffered" 
a civil war for the abolition of slavery, were 
indeed worthy to give such an example to the 
world. 

Thus they remain faithful to the traditions of 
the founders of their independence and demon- 
strate that the enormous rise of their industrial 
strength and of their economic and financial 
power has not weakened in them that need for 
an ideal without which there can be no great 
action. 

What touches us particularly is that the United 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 93 

States has held to the friendship which at an 
earher time was ratified in blood. We bear wit- 
ness with grateful joy to ihe enduring sympathy 
between the peoples, which is one of the delicate 
virtues the bosom of a democracy can nourish. 

The Star-Spangled Banner and the Tri-Color 
will fly side by side; our hands will join; our 
hearts beat in unison. This will mean for us, 
after so much suffering, heroically borne, so 
many bereavements, so many ruins, a renewal of 
the sentiments which have animated and sus- 
tained us during this long trial. The powerful, 
decisive aid which the United States brings us 
is not only a material aid; it will be especially 
moral aid, a real consolation. 

Seeing the conscience of peoples everywhere in 
the world awake and rise in an immense protest 
against the atrocities of which we are the victims, 
we feel more keenly that we are fighting not only 
for ourselves and for our allies, but for something 
immortal, and that we are laying the foundations 
of a new order. Thus our sacrifices will not 
have been in vain ; the generous blood poured 
out by the sons of France will have sowed fertile 
seeds in the ideas of justice and of liberty funda- 
mentally necessary to concord between nations. 

In the name of the whole country, the govern- 
ment of the French Republic addresses to the 



94 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

government and people of the United States, with 
the expression of its gratitude, its warmest good 
wishes. 



•I 



THE HARVEST OF JUSTICE 

M. Paul Dechanel, 
President of the French Chamber of Deputies 



Delivered in the Chamber of Deputies, 
April 6th, 1917 



THE HARVEST OF JUSTICE 
Paul Dechanel 

The French Chamber greets with enthusiasm 
the verdict of the President of the RepubUc of the 
United States, who has indeed spoken for justice, 
and the vigorous decision of the Federal Senate 
accepting the war imposed by Germany. 

^chylus says in "The Persians": "When 
insolence takes root, it grows into crime; the 
harvest is suffering." 

And we can say: "The growth of the crime 
brings vengeance; after the harvest of suffering 
comes the harvest of justice!" 

The cry of the women and children from the 
depths of the abyss where hideous wickedness 
flung them echoed from one end of the earth to 
the other. Washington and Lincoln trembled in 
their graves; their great spirit has roused 
America. 

And is it a question only of avenging Ameri- 
cans? Is it a question only of punishing the 
violation of treaties signed by the United States ? 
No ; the eternal truths proclaimed in the Declara- 
tion in 1776, the sacred causes which LaFayette 
and Rochambeau defended, the ideal of pure con- 
sciences from which the Great Republic was born 
—honor, morality, liberty— these are the supreme 
97 



98 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

values which shine in the folds of the Star-Span- 
gled Banner. 

Descendants of the Puritans of New England, 
brought up on the precepts of the Gospel, and 
who under the eyes of God are about to punish 
the infernal creation of evil, falsehood, perjury, 
assassination, profanation, rape, slavery, martyr- 
dom, and all kinds of disasters ; Catholics sfruck 
to the heart by curses against their religion, by 
outrages against their cathedrals and statues, 
reaching a climax in the destruction of Louvain 
and Rheims; university professors, trustworthy 
guardians of law and learning; industrialists of 
the East and Middle West, farmers and agricul- 
turists of the West; workmen and artisans, 
threatened by the torpedoing of vessels, by the 
interruption of commerce, revolted by the insults 
to their national colors — all are arrayed against 
the mad arrogance which would enslave the earth, 
the sea, the heavens, and the souls of men. 

At a time when, as in the heroic times of the 
American Revolution, the Americans are to fight 
with us, let us repeat once more: We wish to 
prevent no one from living, working, and trading 
freely, but the tyranny of Prussia has become 
a peril for the New World as for the Old, for 
England as for Russia, for Italy as for Austria, 
and for Germany itself. To free the world, by 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 99 

a common effort of all democratic peoples, from 
the yoke of a feudal and military caste in order 
to found peace upon right, is a work of human 
deliverance and universal good. 

In accomplishing, under an administration 
henceforth immortal, the greatest act in its annals 
since the abolition of slavery, the glorious nation 
whose whole history is but a development of the 
idea of liberty remains true to its lofty origin 
and creates for itself another claim to the grati- 
tude of mankind. 

The French Republic, across the ruins of its 
cities and its monuments, devastated without rea- 
son or excuse by shameful savagery, sends to its 
beloved sister Republic in America the palms of 
the Marne, the Yser, and of Verdun and the 
Somme, to which new victories will soon be 
added. 



OUR HERITAGE OF LIBERTY 

M. Rene Viviani, 

Former Prime Minister and Minister of Justice 

of France, President of the French 

Mission to the United States 



Delivered before the Senate of the United States, 
May 1st, 1917 



OUR HERITAGE OF LIBERTY 
Rene Viviani 

Mr. President and Senators : Since I have been 
granted the supreme honor of speaking before the 
representatives of the American people, may I 
ask them first to allow me to thank this magnifi- 
cent Capital for the welcome it has accorded us ? 
Accustomed as we are in our own free land to 
popular manifestations, and though we had been 
warned by your fellow-countrymen who live in 
Paris of the enthusiasm burning in your hearts, 
we are still full of the emotion raised by the 
sights that awaited us. 

I shall never cease to see the proud and stalwart 
men who saluted our passage; your women, 
whose grace adds fresh beauty to your city, their 
arms outstretched, full of flowers ; and your chil- 
dren hurrying to meet us as if our coming were 
looked upon as a lesson for them— all with one 
accord acclaiming in our perishable persons im- 
mortal France. 

And I predict there will be a yet grander mani- 
festation on the day when your illustrious Presi- 
dent, relieved from the burden of power, will 
come among us bearing the salute of the Republic 
of the United States to a free Europe, whose 
foundations from end to end shall be based 
on Right. 

103 



104 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

It is with unspeakable emotion that we crossed 
the threshold of this legislative palace, where 
prudence and boldness meet, and that I for the 
first time in the annals of America, though a 
foreigner, speak in this hall which only a few 
days since resounded with the words of virile 
force. 

You have set all the democracies of the world 
the most magnificent example. So soon as the 
common peril was made manifest to you, with 
simplicity and within a few short days you voted 
a formidable war credit and proclaimed that a 
formidable army was to be raised. President 
Wilson's commentary on his acts, which you made 
yours, remains in the history of free peoples the 
weightiest of lessons. 

Doubtless you were resolved to avenge the 
insults offered your flag, which the whole world 
respected; doubtless through the thickness of 
these massive walls the mournful cry of all the 
victims that criminal hands hurled into the depths 
of the sea has reached and stirred your souls ; 
but it will be your honor in history that you also 
heard the cry of humanity and invoked against 
autocracy the right of democracies. 

And I can only wonder as I speak what, if they 
still have any power to think, are the thoughts of 
the autocrats who three years ago against us, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 105 

three months ago against you, unchained this con- 
flict. 

Ah ! doubtless they said among themselves that 
a democracy is an ideal government; that it 
showers reforms on mankind; that it can in the 
domain of labor quicken all economic activities. 
And yet now we see the French Republic fighting 
in defense of its territory and the liberty of na- 
tions and opposing to the avalanche let loose by 
the Prussian militarism the union of all its chil- 
dren, who are still capable of striking many a 
weighty blow. 

And now we see England, far removed like 
you from conscription, who has also, by virtue 
of a discipline all accept, raised from her soil 
millions of fighting men. And we see other na- 
tions accomplishing the same act ; and that liberty 
not only inflames all hearts, but co-ordinates and 
brings into being all needed efforts. 

And now we see all America rise and sharpen 
her weapons in the midst of peace for the com- 
mon struggle. 

Together we will carry on that struggle, and 
when by force we have at last imposed military 
victory our labors will not be concluded. Our 
task will be — I quote the noble words of President 
Wilson — to organize the society of nations. 

I well know that our enemies, who have never 



106 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

seen before them anything but horizons of carn- 
age, will never cease to jeer at so noble a design. 
Such has always been the fate of great ideas at 
their birth ; and if thinkers and men of action had 
allowed themselves to be discouraged by skeptics, 
mankind would still be in its infancy and we 
should still be slaves. After material victory we 
will win this moral victory. 

We will shatter the ponderous sword of mili- 
tarism; we will establish guaranties for peace; 
and then we can disappear from the world's stage, 
since we shall leave at the cost of our common 
immolation the noblest heritage future genera- 
tions can possess. 



THEIR MONUMENT IN OUR HEARTS 
M. Rene Viviani 



Delivered before the Tomb of Washington, 
April 29th, 1917 



THEIR MONUMENT IN OUR HEARTS 
Rene Viviani 

We could not remain longer in Washington 
without accomplishing this pious pilgrimage. In 
this spot lies all that is mortal of a great hero. 
Close by this spot is the modest abode where 
Washington rested after the tremendous labor 
of achieving for a nation its emancipation. 

In this spot meet the admiration of the whole 
world and the veneration of the American people. 
In this spot rise before us the glorious memories 
left by the soldiers of France led by Rochambeau 
and LaFayette ; a descendant of the latter, my 
friend, M. de Chambrun, accompanies us. 

And I esteem it a supreme honor, as well as a 
satisfaction for my conscience, to be entitled to 
render this homage to our ancestors in the pres- 
ence of my colleague and friend, Mr. Balfour, 
who so nobly represents his great nation. By 
thus coming to lay here the respectful tribute of 
every English mind he shows, in this historic 
moment of communion which France has willed, 
what nations that live for liberty can do. 

When we contemplate in the distant past the 
luminous presence of Washington, in nearer times 
the majestic figure of Abraham Lincoln; when 
we respectfully salute President Wilson, the 
worthy heir of these great memories, we at one 
109 



110 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

glance measure the vast career of the American 

people. 

It is because the American people proclaimed 
and won for the nation the right to govern itself, 
it is because it proclaimed and won the equality 
of all men, that the free American people at the 
hour marked by fate had been enabled with com- 
manding force to carry its action beyond the seas ; 
it is because it was resolved to extend its action 
still further that Congress w^as enabled to obtain 
within the space of a few days the vote of con- 
scription and to proclaim the necessity for a na- 
tional army in the full splendor of civil peace. 

In the name of France, I salute the young army 
which will share in our common glory. 

While paying this supreme tribute to the 
memory of Washington, I do not diminish 
the effect of my words when I turn my thought 
to the memory of so many unnamed heroes. I 
ask you before this tomb to bow in earnest 
meditation and all the fervor of piety before 
all the soldiers of the allied nations who for 
nearly three years have been fighting under dif- 
ferent flags for some ideal. 

I beg you to address the homage of your 
hearts and souls to all the heroes, born to live 
in happiness, in the tranquil pursuit of their la- 
bors, in the enjoyment of all human affections, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS HI 

who went into battle with virile cheerfulness and 
gave themselves up, not to death alone, but to 
the eternal silence that closes over those whose 
sacrifices remain unnamed, in the full knowledge 
that, save for those who loved them, their names 
would disappear with their bodies. 

Their monument is in our hearts. Not the 
living alone greet us here; the ranks of the dead 
themselves rise to surround the soldiers of liberty. 

At this solemn hour in the history of the world, 
while saluting from this sacred mound the final 
victory of justice, I send to the Republic of the 
United States the greetings of the French Re- 
public. 



TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTA- 
TIVES 

M. Rene Viviani 



Address delivered before the House of Representa- 
tives ot the United States, 
May 3rd, 1917 



TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
Rene Viviani 

Gentlemen : Once more, my fellow country- 
men and I are admitted to the honour of being 
present at a sitting in a legislative Chamber. May 
I be permitted to express our emotion at this 
solemn derogation against rules more than a 
century old, and, so far as my own person is con- 
cerned, may I say that, as a member of Parlia- 
ment accustomed for twenty years to the passions 
and storms which sweep through political assem- 
blies, I appreciate more than any one at this 
moment the supreme joy of being near this 
chair, which is in such a commanding position 
that however feeble may be the voice that speaks 
thence, it is heard over the whole world. 

Gentlemen, I will not thank you ; not because 
our gratitude fails, but because new words to 
express it fail. No, I do not thank you for your 
welcome. We all felt, my companions and my- 
self, that the manifestations which rose toward 
our persons came not only from your lips. We 
felt that you were not merely fulfilling the obliga- 
tions of international courtesy. Suddenly, in all 
its charming intimacy, the complexity of the 
American soul was revealed to us. 

When one meets an American, one is supposed 
to n-.eet a practical man, merely a practical man, 

115 



116 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

caring only for business, only interested in busi- 
ness. But when at certain hours in private life 
one studies the American soul, one discovers at 
the same time how fresh and delicate it is; and 
when at certain moments of public life one con- 
siders the soul of the Nation, then one sees all 
the force of the ideals that rise from it: so that 
this American people, in its perfect balance, is at 
once practical and sentimental, a realizer and a 
dreamer, and is always ready to place its practical 
qualities at the disposal of its puissant thoughts. 

And see, gentlemen, what a glorious compari- 
son, to our profit, to yours also, we can establish 
between our enemies and us. Entrusted with 
a mandate from a free people we came among 
free men to compare our ideas, to exchange 
our views, to measure the whole extent of the 
problems raised by this war. And all the allied 
nations, simply because they repose on demo- 
cratic institutions, through their governments 
meet in the same lofty region, on equal terms, in 
full liberty. 

I well know that at this very hour, in the 
Central Empire, there is an absolute monarch who 
binds to his will by vassal links of steel other 
peoples. It has been said this was a sign of 
strength: it is only a derisive appearance of 
strength. And in truth, only a few weeks ago, 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 117 

on the eve of the day when outraged America 
was about to rise in its force, on the morrow of 
the day when the Russian revolution, faithful to 
its alliance, called at once its soldiers to arms 
and its people to independence, this absolute mon- 
arch was seen to totter on the steps of his throne, 
as he felt the first breath of the tempest pass over 
his crown. And he bent toward his people in 
humiliation, and in order to win its sympathy 
borrowed from free peoples their highest insti- 
tutions and promised his subjects universal suf- 
frage. 

Here, as in the crucial hours of our history, as 
in these of yours, it is liberty which clears the 
way for our soldiers. We are all now united in 
our common effort for civilization, for right. 

The day before yesterday, in a public meeting 
at which I was present, I heard one of your great- 
est orators say with deep emotion: "It has been 
sworn on the tomb of Washington." And I 
understood the full emotion and import of those 
words. If W^ashington could rise from his tomb, 
if from his sacred mound he could view the world 
as it now is, shrunk to smaller proportions by the 
lessening of material and moral distances, and 
the increase of every kind of communication be- 
tween men, he would feel his labors are not yet 
concluded ; and that, just as a man of superior and 



118 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

powerful mind has a debt to all other men, so a 
superior and powerful nation owes a debt to other 
nations; after establishing its own independence 
it must aid others to maintain their independence 
or to conquer it. This is the mysterious logic 
of history which President Wilson so marvelously 
understood, thanks to a mind as vigorous as it is 
subtle, as capable of analysis as It is of synthesis, 
of minute observation followed by swift action. 
It has been sworn on the tomb of Washington. 
It has been sworn on the tomb of our allied sol- 
diers, fallen in a sacred cause ! It has been sworn 
by the bedside of our wounded men ! It has been 
sworn on the heads of our orphan children ! It 
has been sworn on cradles and on tombs ! It has 
been sworn ! 



TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN 
M. Rene Viviani 



Delivered before the Illinois State Legislature, 
Springfield, Illinois, May 7th, 1917 



TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN 
Rene Viviani 

Gentlemen and Ladies: 

Before coming here we went to the field of 
silence to lay quick-fading flowers on the immor- 
tal tomb of Abraham Lincoln, and bear to his 
great shade the greeting of all France. 

And I would have you know that however great 
the distance between Springfield and France may 
be, the radiance of his noble face has long been 
known in our native land. In no democracy, in no 
modern democracy, did any man ofifer the world 
a purer image than he by his noble career. That 
career is far better known to you than to me. 
You know that, born of the people, the son of a 
man who could not read, after having in his youth 
suffered every sort of privation, he rose through 
silent meditation, by study, to the full cultiva- 
tion of his mind and the full development of his 
will. You know that silently he rose to the sum- 
mit of civic honor: and that from the summit 
he had attained he looked with untroubled gaze 
upon a great, an heroic, a tragic duty: he knew 
that the minds of men cannot without abasement 
live in contact with injustice. And that is why 
whatever pity and compassion rent his soul, since 
the equality of all human beings must needs be 
proclaimed, since the laws must needs rise to the 
121 



122 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

level of man's dignity in all places, he let loose 
civil war upon his native land — that civil war 
whose heroes we have seen in their old age recon- 
ciled, wherever we have passed. On the morrow 
of his gigantic enterprise he died. He cannot be 
said to have been buried in his triumph: that 
triumph will last as long as an American is left 
to revere it, and we have come here to salute 
his great memory in the name of France, of the 
French Republic. But permit me to recall with just 
pride that the French of the French Revolution, 
of the Revolution of 1848, also proclaimed the 
rights of man. And this shows that all democ- 
racies, in spite of distance and time, are one. And 
when three years ago Imperial Germany in arms, 
without provocation, without a shadow of excuse, 
by right of force alone, rushed on France, tore up 
international rights and violated all human con- 
sciences, France with her allies defended those 
eternal principles. And for three years she has 
defended them. And now America in turn, to 
their defence rises at the call of her illustrious 
President, Mr. Wilson, who, too, though a man 
of thought and a philosopher, has seen he must 
become a man of action when these eternal prin- 
ciples exacted reparation and vengeance. 

Now, we are all united in this great struggle, 
worthy to be ranked with the struggles of the 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 123 

French Revolution. We all are united to defend 
right and justice. And our French hearts thrilled 
with gratitude when we heard the words of your 
President, of your Governor. Yes : we feel as if 
at every step in this blissful valley we found old 
memories of our beloved motherland, as if we had 
never left it. Here it was, as you said, Mr. Presi- 
dent, that French missionaries, the first French 
to discover the Mississippi, came to labor, to live, 
to die. Here it was they founded the first govern- 
ment that ruled over this land which once was 
French, where the French flag floats once more 
in tragic hours, our flag which carries in its folds 
all our hopes, and calls to file every form of cour- 
age in all our sons. Here we find the shades and 
memories of our forefathers. You can well un- 
derstand what emotions swell in the heart of a 
Frenchman when this tragic meeting comes about 
on American soil. But is it enough to evoke these 
memories in a speech? Must we bury all our 
ardent hopes in our hearts? I shall not forget, 
but transmit to my fellow countrymen your desire 
to pay back your debt of gratitude to France, in 
memory of LaFayette who brought here help and 
French soldiers to fight for American independ- 
ence. But permit me, without any thought of 
diminishing the effect of your words, to define 
their full sense. It is not to France your debt 



124 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

lies. What France did for America, she did for 
liberty, with no thought of exacting a reward for 
it some day. It is to all humanity your debt of 
gratitude should be paid : humanity and France 
here are one. Yes, it is because that noble land 
has at all times in its history held in its hands 
the fate of the world : it is because on our terri- 
tory which seems to have been chosen by history 
as the meeting place for all combats and immola- 
tions, that the fate of the world has so often been 
decided; because our children with their hearts, 
their arms, their hands, their brains, are strug- 
gling even now to keep liberty from perishing, 
to keep disaster away from the whole world; it 
is because of all that you have risen in arms. And 
when you rally to France, you rally to the cause 
of liberty, of right, of democracy. 

Come, then. We will bear away from your 
land the memory of these meetings of free citi- 
zens, and when we return to our country, when 
the free citizens of republican France ask us what 
we have seen, we will answer: We have seen 
crowds tumultuous in their joy, enthusiastic 
crowds, but they came not forth to see alone, to 
gaze on passing men : they came as to some great 
duty, to acclaim France through us. We will 
take back the words of all your orators : we will 
tell what you think, what you desire, what you 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 125 

hope for from the future, not only a free and 
delivered France, but a regenerate Europe, 
founded on right at last, built on the rock of jus- 
tice. 

And when this great work shall have been 
accomplished, American brothers, faithful to the 
traditions of Washington and Abraham Lincoln, 
you may return in pious pilgrimage to Mount 
Vernon and to the graveyard of Springfield and 
there bow in silent reverence before the two pure 
heroes of your race. You will most surely have 
served their memory ; and rest assured that by 
so doing you will have broadened yet the glorious 
annals of the American Republic. 



TO THE HOUSE OF REPRE- 

SENTATIVES 

The Prince of Udine, 

Head of the ItaUan Mission to the 
United States 



Delivered before the House of Representatives 

of the United States, 

June 2nd, 1917 



TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
The Prince of Udine 

Mr. Speaker and Members of the House : No 
one could appreciate the honor of your invitation 
more than myself and my colleagues. 

To address the Representatives of the greatest 
among new democracies at a time when the desti- 
nies of humanity are awaiting decision, at a time 
when our destiny and yours depend on the issue 
of the war, to bring you the greeting of distant 
brothers who are fighting for the same ideals at 
the foot of the snowy Alps or in the deadly 
trenches, to express to you our feelings and our 
sympathy for your feelings— all those are for 
me so many reasons for legitimate pride. 

During our brief stay among you we have 
found everywhere the most joyous welcome and 
the most friendly cordiality. Everywhere it was 
not only friendly words that greeted us, but also 
friendly souls who welcomed us. 

We have felt deeply moved by this. 

We know, gentlemen, that such cordial senti- 
ments, such hearty friendship, are meant not so 
much for our persons as for our beautiful and 
distant country ; our country, of which every foot 
is sacred to us because of its century-old great- 
ness and sufferings and because of the noble 
129 



130 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

share which it has always had in human thought 
and history. 

But your great RepubHc, when it grants us 
such courteous hospitahty, honors still more that 
which at the present moment is dearest to us — 
the efforts of Italy's soldiers, the noble sacrifice 
of so many young lives freely given for their 
country and for civilization and in defense of 
ideas which you have made your own and which 
we all love. 

In the name of the soldiers of Italy, one of 
whom I am proud to be ; in the name of all those 
who are fighting on the mountains, on the plains 
and on the treacherous seas ; in the name of those 
to whom your words of friendship have brought 
a message of hope and faith across the ocean, I 
thank you from the bottom of my heart. 

The aims of the war for the allied nations 
were pointed out by President Wilson in his 
magnificent message, which will not only remain 
in the minds of our descendants as a historic 
event, but which has already aroused, because 
of its moral force, intense admiration among all 
civilized peoples. We shall be satisfied, what- 
ever sacrifices we may be called upon to make, 
when the rights of humanity are assured, when 
the guaranties of peace are effectual, and when 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 131 

free nations are able to work for their own pros- 
perity and elevation. 

President Wilson has proclaimed that to the 
Americans right is more precious than peace and 
that the people of the United States are ready 
to shed their blood in defense of those principles 
in the name of which they became a nation. 

For the sake of the same principles we are 
ready to face every sacrifice and every sorrow. 

We are fighting a terrible war. Our enemies 
were long since prepared for it, while we were 
content to live, trusting in peace, and only sought 
to contribute to the development of our people 
and to the progress of our country, almost uncon- 
scious of the clouds which so suddenly grew 
dark over our heads. 

We came into the war when we realized that 
there was no room for neutrals and that neutral- 
ity was neither possible nor desirable, when the 
freedom of all democratic nations was threatened 
and the very existence of free peoples was at 
stake. 

Ever since that day we have not hesitated 
before any danger or any suffering. Our wide 
fighting front presents conditions of exceptional 
difficulty. The enemy is, or has been until now, 
in possession of the best positions. He has dug 
deep trenches ; he has concealed his guns among 



132 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

mountains. We are even compelled to fight at 
altitudes of eight and ten thousand feet in spots, 
where it seemed impossible that any fighting 
should ever take place. We are alone on our 
wide and treacherous front, and every step for- 
ward that we take, every progress that we accom- 
plish costs us great efforts and many lives. The 
enthusiasm of our soldiers has often helped them 
among the glaciers of the Alps and the many 
snares of the Carso to triumph over difficulties 
which seemed to defy every human effort. But 
the deep faith which burns in them, kept their 
strength alive. 

We must, we will, triumph over other difficul- 
ties and other insidious devices. 

Nature, which gave us our pure skies, our mild 
climate, has denied us almost entirely the two 
great necessities of modern industries — coal and 
iron. Therefore, with industries still in course 
of formation, Italy has had ever since their incep- 
tion to overcome obstacles which appeared 
insuperable. Italy occupies one of the first places 
in Europe as regards the number and power of 
her waterfalls ; but this wealth, which constitutes 
the great reserve of the future, has only been 
partly exploited until now. The treacherous 
enemy, who has long since prepared the weapons 
of aggression, not having obtained victory on 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 133 

the field, Is now trying by means of submarine 
warfare to endanger our existence, to cause a 
scarcity of food, and, above all, a sca.rcity of 
the coal, for her railways, and for her industries. 

We have reduced the consumption of all neces- 
sities, and we are ready to reduce it still further 
within the limits of possibility. We do not com- 
plain of the privations that we have to endure. 
Wealth itself has no value if life and liberty are 
endangered. And when millions of soldiers offer 
their young lives for their country, there is not 
one among the civil population who is not ready 
to make any sacrifice. 

But to overcome the dangers of submarines, 
which, in defiance of every law of humanity, are 
not only destroying wealth, but endangering the 
lives of peaceful travelers, sinking hospital ships, 
and murdering women and children, we must all 
make a great effort. 

We must unite all our forces to oppose the 
strongest resistance to the insidious devices of 
the enemy. You possess a great and magnificent 
industrial organization. You, more than any one, 
are in a position to put an end to the enemy's 
barbarous dream and to create with your energy 
much more than he can destroy. 

This great and terrible trial can only make us 
better men. They who know how to offer to the 



134 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

fatherland their wealth and their lives ; they who 
give themselves unto death and, more than them- 
selves, that which is sweetest and most sacred, 
their children; they who are ready to suffer and 
to die; they will know when the morrow dawns 
how to contribute to civilization new elements of 
moral nobility and of strength. 

We must not grieve over our sorrows. When 
we fight for the rights of humanity we are con- 
scious that we are elevating ourselves morally. 

When America proclaimed herself one with us 
a great joy ran through every city and every lit- 
tle village of Italy. We knew the full value of 
your co-operation, and at the same time we appre- 
ciated the nobility of your sentiments. 

The families of 30,000,000 Italians who dwell 
in the United States under the protection of your 
hospitable and just laws, felt a deep sense of joy. 

Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, the 
words which his Majesty the King of Italy, first 
among our soldiers, wrote to your President 
expressed his feelings and those of all his people. 

To-morrow, when the news reaches Italy that 
this Congress, which represents the will of the 
American Nation, has desired to give to our mis- 
sion the supreme honor of welcoming it in its 
midst, your friendly words will reach the farther- 
most points where men are fighting and suffering. 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 135 

And in the trenches, at the foot of the majestic 
Alps, there, where the struggle is bitterest and 
where death is ever present, a thrill of joy and 
of hope will be felt- — the joy of a sincere union, 
the hope of certain victor}^ 



GREETINGS FROM BELGIUM 

Baron Ludovic Moncheur, 

Former Belgian Minister to the United States, 

Head of the Belgian Mission to the 

United States 



Delivered before the Senate of the United States, 
June 22nd, 1917 



GREETINGS FROM BELGIUM 

LUDOVIC MONCHEUR 

You all know the unspeakable evils which have 
befallen my unfortunate country — the unpro- 
voked invasion, accompanied by a deliberate 
system of terror, the burning of many of our 
thriving cities, and of innumerable villages, the 
massacre of thousands of our peaceful citizens, 
the pillage and devastation of our country. 

Then followed the iron hand of foreign domi- 
nation, enormous war contributions exacted from 
all the nine provinces of Belgium, ruinous requi- 
sitions of all sorts from our people, the seizure 
of the raw material of industry, and even the 
theft of our machinery which was sent into the 
country of our enemy for his own use, so that 
now the silence of death reigns in our industrial 
centers which before had been the most active in 
Europe. 

You also know, gentlemen, the way in which 
this regime of oppression has been carried out — 
eighty thousand Belgians condemned in the space 
of one year to various penalties for having dis- 
pleased the invader, as, for example, the noble 
Burgomaster of Brussels, who has been in im- 
prisonment for the past two years for trying to 
uphold the principle of civic liberty which for 
centuries has been so ideal to all Belgians. 
139 



140 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

You have learned also of the deportation of 
our workmen into Germany — a crime the horrors 
of which, according to the opinion of one of our 
countrymen, should cause more indignation 
throughout the entire world than all the previous 
outrages against the sacred principles of justice 
and humanity. 

But Belgium, even in the midst of the terrible 
misfortunes which have been brought upon her 
by her fidelity to treaties and by respect for her 
plighted word, does not regret her decision, and 
there is not a single Belgian worthy of the name 
who does not now, as on the first day of the war, 
approve the judgment of our Government that 
it is better to die, if need be, rather than to live 
without honor. Like Patrick Henry, all Belgians 
say, *'Give me liberty or give me death." 

This sentiment will be shared by all the citizens 
of the great American nation, who responded 
with such enthusiasm and with such unanimity 
to the noble words of your President, when, in 
terms which held the world spellbound, he pro- 
claimed the imprescriptible right of justice over 
force. 

The courage of my fellow-countrymen has 
been strengthened, also, by the sympathy for our 
misfortunes which has been manifested through- 
out your great land. American initiative has be- 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 141 

stowed most generous help upon our starving 
population, and in offering from this tribune the 
expression of gratitude of every Belgian heart, 
I wish, also to render special homage to that 
admirable organization the Commission for Relief 
in Belgium, which has done so much to save our 
people from starvation. 

Yes, gentlemen, the sympathy of America gives 
us new courage, and while King Albert, who 
since the fateful day when our territory was vio- 
lated, has remained steadfastly at the front, con- 
tinues the struggle with indomitable energy at 
the head of our army intrenched upon the last 
strip of soil that remains to us, while the Queen, 
that worthy companion of a great sovereign, ex- 
pends her unceasing efforts to comfort and 
relieve the victims cf battle, exciting enthusiasm 
by her contempt for the danger to which she 
exposes herself day by day, on the other side of 
the enemy's lines of steel stand the Belgian 
people, bowed beneath the yoke but never con- 
quered, maintaining their unshaken patriotism in 
spite of the enemy as well as in spite of his iron 
rule. The Belgian population, a martyr whose 
courage is upheld by our great Cardinal Mercier, 
awaits silently in the sacred union of all parties 
the final hour of deliverance. 

That hour, gentlemen, will, I am convinced. 



142 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

be materially hastened by the powerful aid of the 
United States, and the time approaches when 
Belgium, restored to full and complete independ- 
ence, both politically and economically, will be 
able to thank in a fitting manner all those who 
have aided her to emerge from the darkness of 
the tomb into the glorious light of a new life. 



THE NEW RUSSIA 

Professor Boris Bakhmetieff, 

Head of the Russian Mission to the 
United States 



Delivered before the Senate of the United States 
June 26th, 1917 



THE NEW RUSSIA 
Boris Bakhmetieff 

At this moment all eyes are turned on Russia. 
Many hopes and doubts are raised by the tide of 
events in the greatest of revolutions, at an epoch 
in the vv^orld's greatest war. The fate of nations, 
the fate of the world, is at stake. The revolution 
called for the reconstruction of the very founda- 
tion of our national life. The creation anew of a 
country of boundless expanse on distinctly new 
principles will, of course, take time, and impa- 
tience should not be shown in the consummation 
of so grand an event as Russia's entry into the 
ranks of free nations. 

We should not forget that in this immense 
transformation, various interests will seek to 
assert themselves, and, until the work of settle- 
ment is completed, a struggle among opposing 
currents is inevitable, and exaggerations cannot 
be avoided. Attempts on the part of disorganiz- 
ing elements to take advantage of this moment 
of transition must be expected and met with 
calmness and confidence. 

Two considerations make me feel that Russia 
has passed the stage of the world when the 
future appeared vague and uncertain. In the 
first place is the firm conviction of the necessity 
of legality which is widely developing and firmly 
145 



146 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

establishing itself through the country. This 
principle is based on the doctrine that govern- 
ments derive their just power from the consent 
of the governed, and hence a strong government 
must be created by the will of the people. My 
latest advice gives joyful confirmation of the 
establishment of a firm power, strong in its demo- 
cratic precepts and activity, strong in the trust 
reposed in it by the people in its ability to enforce 
law and order. 

In the second place and no less important is 
the growing conviction that the issues of the 
revolution and the future of Russia's freedom are 
closely connected with the fighting might of the 
country. It is such power, it is the force of arms 
which alone can define and make certain the 
achievements of the revolution against autocratic 
aggression. There has been a period closely fol- 
lowing the revolution of almost total suspension 
of all military activity, a period of what appeared 
to be disintegration of the army, a period which 
gave rise to serious doubts and to gloomy fore- 
bodings. At the same time there ensued unlimited 
freedom of speech and of the press, which 
afforded opportunities for expression of the most 
extreme and anti-national views, from all of 
which resulted wide-spread rumors throughout 
the world that Russia would abandon the war 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 147 

and conclude a separate peace with the Central 
Powers. 

With all emphasis and with deepest conviction, 
may I reiterate the statement that such rumors 
were wholly without foundation in fact. Russia 
rejects with indignation any idea of separate 
peace. What my country is striving for is the 
establishment of a firm and lasting peace between 
democratic nations. Russia is firmly convinced 
that a separate peace would mean the triumph 
of German autocracy, would render lasting 
peace impossible, create the greatest danger for 
democracy and liberty, and ever be a threatening 
menace to the new-born freedom of Russia. 

Conscious of its enormous task, the Provisional 
Government is taking measures to promptly 
restore throughout the country, conditions of life 
so deeply disorganized by the inefficiency of the 
previous rulers, and to provide for whatever is 
necessary for military success. 

Russia wants the world to be safe for democ- 
racy. To make it safe means to have democracy 
rule the world. 



TRIBUTE TO WASHINGTON 

Viscount Kikujiro Ishii, 

Head of the Japanese Mission to the 
United States 



Delivered before the Tomb of Washington, 
August 26th, 1917 



TRIBUTE TO WASHINGTON 

KiKUJIRO ISHII 

In the name of my gracious sovereign, the 
Emperor of Japan, and representing all the lib- 
erty-loving people who own his sway, I stand 
to-day in this sacred presence, not to eulogize 
the name of Washington, for that were presump- 
tion, but to offer the simple tribute of a people's 
reverence and love. 

Washington was an American, but America, 
great as she is, powerful as she is, certain as she 
IS of her splendid destiny, can lay no exclusive 
claim to this immortal name. Washington is now 
a citizen of the world; to-day he belongs to all 
mankind. And so men come here from the ends 
of the earth to honor his memory and to reiterate 
their faith in the principles to which his great life 
was devoted. 

Japan claims entrance to this holy circle. She 
yields to none in reverence and respect; nor is 
there any gulf between the ancient East and the 
new-born West too deep and wide for the hearts 
and the understandings of her people to cross. 
It is fitting, then, that men who love liberty 
and justice better than they love life, that men 
who know what honor is, should seek this shrine 
and here, in the presence of these sacred ashes, 
rededicate themselves to the service of humanity. 
151 



152 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

It Is a fitting place, at this time, when all the 
world is filled with turmoil and suffering, for 
comrades in a holy cause to gather and here 
renew their fealty to a righteous purpose, firm in 
the determination that the struggle must go on 
until the world is free from menace and aggres- 
sion. 

Japan is proud to place herself beside her noble 
allies in this high resolve, and here, in the pres- 
ence of these deathless ashes, she reaffirms her 
devotion to the cause and the principles for which 
they wage battle, fully determined to do her 
whole part in securing for the world the blessings 
of liberty, justice, and lasting peace. 

As the representative of my people, then, I 
place this wreath upon the tomb of Washington 
with reverent hands; and in so doing it is my 
proud privilege to again pledge my country to 
those principles of right and justice which have 
given immortality to the name of Washington. 



THE MESSAGE TO THE POPE 

Hon. Woodrow Wilson, 

August 27, 1917. 



Although this message is not an address but a written 
communication, no collection of statements relative 
to the World War would be complete without it. It 
summarizes with wonderful clearness the reasons 
why the Allies must carry on the conflict to the point 
where German Autocracy is crushed. 



THE MESSAGE TO THE POPE 
WooDROw Wilson 

Every heart that has not been blinded and 
hardened by this terrible war must be touched 
by this moving appeal of His Holiness the Pope, 
must feel the dignity and force of the humane 
and generous motives which prompted it, and 
must fervently wish that we might take the path 
of peace he so persuasively points out. But it 
would be folly to take it if it does not in fact 
lead to the goal he proposes. Our response must 
be based upon the stern facts and upon nothing 
else. It is not a mere cessation of arms he de- 
sires; it is a stable and enduring peace. This 
agony must not be gone through with again, and 
it must be a matter of very sober judgment what 
will insure us against it. 

His Holiness in substance proposes that we re- 
turn to the status quo ante bellum, and that then 
there be a general condonation, disarmament, 
and a concert of nations based upon an accept- 
ance of the principle of arbitration; that by a 
similar concert freedom of the seas be estab- 
lished; and that the territorial claims of France 
and Italy, the perplexing problems of the Balkan 
states, and the restitution of Poland be left to 
such conciHatory adjustments as may be possible 
155 



156 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

in the new temper of such a peace, due regard 
being paid to the aspirations of the peoples whose 
poHtical fortunes and affihations will be involved. 
It is manifest that no part of this program can 
be successfully carried out unless the restitution 
of the status quo ante furnishes a firm and satis- 
factory basis for it. The object of this war is to 
deliver the free peoples of the world from the 
menace and the actual power of a vast military 
establishment controlled by an irresponsible gov- 
ernment which, having secretly planned to dom- 
inate the world, proceeded to carry the plan out 
without regard either to the sacred obligations 
of treaty or the long-established practices and 
long-cherished principles or international action 
and honor; which chose its own time for the 
war; delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly; 
stopped at no barrier either of law or of mercy ; 
swept a whole continent within the tide of blood 
— not the blood of soldiers only, but the blood of 
innocent women and children also and of the 
helpless poor; and now stands balked but not 
defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the world. 
This power is not the German people. It is the 
ruthless master of the German people. It is no 
business of ours how that great people came 
under its control or submitted with temporary 
zest to the domination of its purpose; but it is 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 157 

our business to see to it that the history of the 
rest of the world is no longer left to its handling. 

To deal with such a power by way of peace 
upon the plan proposed by His Holiness the Pope 
would, so far as we can see, involve a recupera- 
tion of its strength and a renewal of its policy; 
would make it necessary to create a permanent 
hostile combination of nations against the Ger- 
man people, who are its instruments ; and would 
result in abandoning the new-born Russia to the 
intrigue, the manifold subtle interference, and the 
certain counter-revolution which would be at- 
tempted by all the malign influences to which the 
German Government has of late accustomed the 
world. Can peace be based upon a restitution 
of its power or upon any word of honor it could 
pledge in a treaty of settlement and accommoda- 
tion? 

Responsible statesmen must now everywhere 
see, if they never saw before, that no peace can 
rest securely upon political or economic restric- 
tions meant to benefit some nations and cripple 
or embarrass others, upon vindictive action of 
any sort, or any kind of revenge or deliberate 
injury. The American people have sufifered in- 
tolerable wrongs at the hands of the Imperial 
German Government, but they desire no reprisal 
upon the German people, who have themselves 



158 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 

suffered all things in this war, which they did 
not choose. They believe that peace should rest 
upon the rights of peoples, not the rights of 
governments — the rights of peoples great or 
small, weak or powerful — their equal right to 
freedom and security and self-government and to 
a participation upon fair terms in the economic 
opportunities of the world, the German people of 
course included, if they will accept equality and 
not seek domination. 

The test, therefore, of every plan of peace is 
this : Is it based upon the faith of all the peoples 
involved or merely upon the word of an am- 
bitious and intriguing government, on the one 
hand, and of a group of free peoples, on the 
other? This is a test which goes to the root of 
the matter; and it is the test which must be ap- 
plied. 

The purposes of the United States in this war 
are known to the whole world, to every people 
to whom the truth has been permitted to come. 
They do not need to be stated again. We seek 
no material advantage of any kind. We believe 
that the intolerable wrongs done in this war by 
the furious and brutal power of the Imperial 
German Government ought to be repaired, but 
not at the expense of the sovereignty of any 
people — rather a vindication of the sovereignty 



THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 159 

both of those that are weak and of those that are 
strong. Punitive damages, the dismemberment 
of empires, the estabhshment of selfish and ex- 
clusive economic leagues, we deem inexpedient 
and in the end worse than futile no proper basis 
for a peace of any kind, least of all for an endur- 
ing peace. That must be based upon justice 
and fairness and the common rights of mankind. 
We can not take the word of the present rulers 
of Germany as a guarantee of anything that is 
to endure, unless explicitly supported by such 
conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of 
the German people themselves as the other peoples 
of the world would be justified in accepting. 
Without such guarantees treaties of settlement, 
agreements for disarmament, covenants to set 
up arbitration in the place of force, territorial 
adjustments, reconstitutions of small nations, if 
made with the German Government, no man, no 
nation could now depend on. We must await 
some new evidence of the purposes of the great 
peoples of the Central Powers. God grant it may 
be given soon and in a way to restore the con- 
fidence of all peoples everywhere in the faith of 
nations and the possibility of a covenanted peace. 



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